Albanese government bans DeepSeek from official devices on security grounds
- Written by Michelle Grattan, Professorial Fellow, University of Canberra
The Albanese government is banning DeepSeek – the Chinese artificial intelligence model – from all government systems and devices on national security grounds.
It says this is in line with the actions of a number of other countries and is based on “risk and threat information” from security and intelligence agencies.
The Chinese platform TikTok is already banned from government systems and devices.
Under the decision, announced by Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke, government bodies must immediately remove all DeepSeek products, applications and services from systems and mobile devices. No new installations are allowed.
But politicians can still have DeepSeek on their personal non-government devices. This presently happens with TikTok – for example opposition leader Peter Dutton has a TikTok account.
While the direction only applies to official systems and devices, the government is also urging all Australians to inform themselves about how their data can be used online and to carefully review a company’s privacy policy on how customer data is managed.
Burke said: “The Albanese government is taking swift and decisive action to protect Australia’s national security and national interest.
"AI is is a technology full of potential and opportunity, but the government will not hesitate to act when our agencies identify a national security risk.
"Our approach is country-agnostic and focused on the risk to the Australian government and our assets.‘
The NSW Department of Customer Service acted late last month to ban DeepSeek from official devices and systems.
The department told Cyber Daily it had "taken a precautionary approach to restrict corporate access to DeepSeek AI, consistent with the approach taken for many new and emerging applications, systems and services”.
Commenting on the NSW department’s decision Dana Mckay, Senior Lecturer in Innovative Interactive Technologies at RMIT, said: “The reason Chinese-made and-owned tools are being banned is that the data they collect is available to the Chinese government not just when a crime has been committed, but also for economic or social reasons.
"DeepSeek even collects keystroke patterns, which can be used to identify individuals, potentially allowing them to match in-work searches with leisure time searches, potentially leading to national security risks,” she said.
“It is fair to ask whether DeepSeek is more dangerous to Australian national security than, say, OpenAI which collects similar data: the difference is that OpenAI will only give data to government to comply with relevant laws, and this typically means where a crime may have been committed.
"Whether governments should be concerned about the level of data collected by commercial companies, such as OpenAI and Google, is still a significant question, but one that is separate to the national security concerns raised by China’s data sovereignty laws.”
Among those banning Deepseek are the Pentagon, the United States Navy, NASA, Italy and Taiwan.
