Microsoft employees are prohibited from using DeepSeek for data security and propaganda reasons, Microsoft Vice Chairman and President Brad Smith said today at a Senate hearing.
“At Microsoft, we do not allow our employees to use the DeepSeek application,” Smith said, referring to the DeepSeek service (which is available on both desktop and mobile devices).
Smith said Microsoft has also kept DeepSeek off its app store because of these issues.
While many organizations and even countries have imposed restrictions on DeepSeek, this is the first time Microsoft has announced such a ban publicly.
Smith said that the restriction is due to the risk that data will be stored in China and that DeepSeek’s responses could be influenced by “Chinese propaganda.”
DeepSeek’s privacy policy states that the company stores user data on Chinese servers. Such data is subject to Chinese law, which requires cooperation with the country’s intelligence services. DeepSeek also heavily censors topics deemed sensitive by the Chinese government.
Despite Smith’s critical comments about DeepSeek, Microsoft offered a DeepSeek R1 model on its Azure cloud service shortly after it went viral earlier this year.
But this is somewhat different from offering the DeepSeek chatbot application itself. Since DeepSeek is open source, anyone can download the model, store it on their own servers, and offer it to their customers without sending the data back to China.
This, however, does not eliminate other risks, such as the spread of a propaganda model or the generation of dangerous code.
During the Senate hearing, Smith said that Microsoft had managed to get inside the DeepSeek AI model and “modify” it to eliminate “harmful side effects.” Microsoft did not specify what exactly it did to the DeepSeek model, citing TechCrunch, which cited Smith’s words.
During the first launch of DeepSeek on Azure, Microsoft wrote that DeepSeek passed “rigorous security testing” before it was deployed on Azure.
While we can’t help but note that the DeepSeek app is also a direct competitor to its own Copilot web search chat app, Microsoft doesn’t ban all such competing chat apps from its Windows app store.
For example, Perplexity is available in the Windows app store. However, no applications from Microsoft’s main competitor Google (including the Chrome browser and the Gemini chatbot) were found in our search for an online store.
