Trump administration considering broader DeepSeek ban

DeepSeek’s moment in the spotlight appears to be over, at least for now, as talk of ChatGPT’s image-generation abilities has dominated the AI conversations. Add all the new OpenAI announcements and Google’s various Gemini upgrades, like the Gemini 2.5 Pro model, and there’s almost no room left for DeepSeek.

But the breakthrough AI chatbot that shocked the US a few months ago is still available to anyone looking to try it. DeepSeek is available on the web and on mobile and, due to its open-source nature, can be installed on any computer.

That’s assuming you can use DeepSeek. Some US governmental branches, as well as certain countries, have already banned the Chinese AI program.

It turns out that the Trump administration is considering a broader ban on DeepSeek in the US, and that’s not necessarily part of the ongoing trade war with China. There’s also an AI war between the US and China, each vying for supremacy. The US has maintained a lead, but government officials worry that China might leapfrog American firms, which would become a big national security risk.

The Trump administration is looking at more than just a DeepSeek ban. The government has also moved to restrict Nvidia’s ability to sell AI chips to China after finding that companies like DeepSeek might have smuggled components needed for AI development from other countries.

It’s always been believed that DeepSeek might have managed to obtain Nvidia chips that it shouldn’t have been allowed to purchase in addition to those it could legally get.

DeepSeek stunned the world in January because it proposed a way to train advanced AI models similar to OpenAI’s best ChatGPT models without having access to the same high-end infrastructure as US companies. Instead, DeepSeek relied on software innovations to do it. That was the official narrative, though some speculated that DeepSeek had on hand more AI chips than it could justify.