Washington has moved to keep DeepSeek, the Chinese AI model that is powerful, popular and embarrassingly cheap, off government devices. Officials describe the decision as a security measure. Procurement staff, speaking on condition of anonymity because their department has not been named publicly since 2019, describe it as something closer to a rescue operation for their pride.
“It answers questions in four seconds, and it costs less than the coffee in our break room,” said Gerald Pruitt, a deputy contracting officer who has overseen a document-sorting system for eleven years at a cost his own budget office refuses to write down. “Do you know what that does to a man who bills by the hour?”
Pruitt’s agency has so far responded to the threat with a 212-page security review, a working group that meets quarterly, and a new internal chatbot that takes six minutes to say “I’m sorry, I can’t help with that.” The vendor is paid per word of apology.
“We are absolutely not against innovation,” one senior official said, before explaining that the current contract runs until 2031 and can only be cancelled by a form that exists solely as a PDF requiring a version of Adobe Reader last updated in 2009. “Cheap things make people ask questions. We would rather everyone just keep paying for the expensive things and not ask anything at all.”