Chinese AI company DeepSeek banned from state-owned devices in Oklahoma: 'Too many security risks'

A Chinese artificial intelligence company called DeepSeek is now banned from state-owned devices in Oklahoma.

Oklahoma Gov. Kevin Stitt sent out a press release confirming the ban on Friday.

“We’re not going to take chances when it comes to protecting Oklahomans’ data,” said Governor Stitt. “DeepSeek has too many security risks, and we’re not about to let foreign adversaries have access to our state’s information. This is about keeping Oklahoma safe and making smart decisions for our future.”

Gov. Stitt said he directed OMES to review DeepSeek and it concluded the program has security risks, regulatory compliance issues, is susceptible to adversarial manipulation and has a lack of robust security safeguards.

The ban covers all state-owned devices including laptops, desktops and mobile phones and tablets.

What is DeepSeek?

DeepSeek is a private Chinese company founded in July 2023 by Liang Wenfeng, a graduate of Zhejiang University, one of China's top universities, who funded the startup via his hedge fund, according to the MIT Technology Review. Liang has about $8 billion in assets, Ives wrote in a Jan. 27 research note.

Liang, who had previously focused on applying AI to investing, had bought a "stockpile of Nvidia A100 chips," a type of tech that is now banned from export to China. Those chips became the basis of DeepSeek, the MIT publication reported.

Ben Reitzes, head of technology research at Melius, told investors in a note that DeepSeek makes legitimate breakthroughs as an AI tool, including better learning and more efficient use of memory, although he expressed skepticism about the "amount of chips used."

How is DeepSeek different than other AI apps? 

DeepSeek is an open-source large language model that relies on what is known as "inference-time computing," which Sette said in layman's terms means "they activate only the most relevant portions of their model for each query, and that saves money and computation power." 

Some experts praised DeepSeek's performance, with noted tech investor Marc Andreessen writing on X on Jan. 24, "DeepSeek R1 is one of the most amazing and impressive breakthroughs I've ever seen — and as open source, a profound gift to the world."

However, Ives said he's skeptical the service will gain ground with major U.S. businesses. 

"No U.S. Global 2000 is going to use a Chinese startup DeepSeek to launch their AI infrastructure and use cases," Ives wrote. "At the end of the day there is only one chip company in the world launching autonomous, robotics, and broader AI use cases and that is Nvidia."