How to Check Whether DeepSeek Runs Inside Your Software

The Decision Brief

Your company builds, buys or runs software with AI inside it, and a customer, an auditor or a contracting officer may soon ask whether any of it runs on DeepSeek. A Homeland Security order made public on Oct. 19 tells civilian agencies to remove DeepSeek products and “third-party products and services developed using DeepSeek implementations.” It does not define the phrase.

We read the signed order, the federal contract clause that governs supplier inquiries, and the documentation of the clouds and AI gateways where DeepSeek models can run under other names. One finding: a gateway’s backup-model list can send a request to DeepSeek during an outage even when the application normally calls something else. We did not test any product, and no check can prove which tools a vendor’s developers once used.

The full piece supplies a six-step lineage check, with the records to keep, what each step cannot prove and who should own it, plus the reporting clocks for federal contractors.

The evidence and the six-step lineage check are below for PRO members. View PRO plans, $10 monthly or $99 annually.