Microsoft employees are prohibited from using the Deepseek app, the president says

Microsoft employees are not permitted to use DeepSeek due to data security and propaganda concerns, Microsoft’s vice-chairman and president Brad Smith said at a Senate hearing today.

“We don’t allow employees to use the DeepSeek app,” Smith said, referring to DeepSeek’s application services (available on both desktop and mobile).

Smith said Microsoft hasn’t even put Deepseek in the App Store for these concerns.

Even many organizations and countries have imposed restrictions on DeepSeek, but this is the first time Microsoft has made public such a ban.

Smith said the restrictions stem from the risk that data will be stored in China, and Deepshek’s answer could be affected by “Chinese propaganda.”

Deepseek’s privacy policy states that it stores user data on servers in China. Such data is subject to Chinese law requiring cooperation with the country’s intelligence reporting agency. Deepseek also censors the very high censorship topics considered sensitive by the Chinese government.

Despite Smith’s critical comments about Deepseek, Microsoft offered the Deepseek R1 model on Azure Cloud Service shortly after it went viral earlier this year.

But that’s a bit different from offering the DeepSeek chatbot app itself. DeepSeek is open source so anyone can download the model, store it on their own server, and provide it to their clients without sending the data back to China.

However, it does not remove other risks, such as models that spread propaganda or generate unsafe code.

During the Senate hearing, Smith said Microsoft had “changed” to enter the AI ​​model of Deepshake and remove “harmful side effects.” Microsoft did not elaborate exactly what they did for the Deepseek model.

With the first launch of Azure’s Deepseek, Microsoft wrote that Deepseek received a “strict red teaming and safety rating” before it was placed on Azure.

While it cannot be pointed out that Deepseek’s app is also a direct competitor to Microsoft’s own Copilot Internet Search Chat app, Microsoft does not ban all chat competitors from the Windows App Store.

For example, I’m confused by the Windows App Store. Microsoft’s Archrival Google apps (including the Chrome browser and Google’s chatbot Gemini) did not surface in Webstore searches.