DHS Issues FASCSA Order #2026-01 Removing DeepSeek From Federal IT

DHS filed FASCSA Exclusion and Removal Order #2026-01 (docket DHS-2026-0628) on October 19, 2026, directing all federal civilian executive agencies to remove DeepSeek products from their IT systems and halt future acquisitions. The order extends to third-party products built on DeepSeek implementations, and US hosting does not exempt a product. DHS cited DeepSeek's data storage on servers in China and warned that locally-hosted weights may contain malware. The order does not specify a public compliance deadline; follow-up guidance from the GSA and individual agency CIOs will set actual timelines. Federal contractors face compliance obligations under FASCSA procedures requiring inventory of affected systems and remediation reporting to the Federal Acquisition Security Council.

Separately, Huawei announced that its Ascend 950PR and 950DT chips achieved day-zero adaptation to DeepSeek's V4 model on the day of the model's release. DeepSeek V4 is a 1.6 trillion parameter Mixture of Experts model with 1 million token context support. DeepSeek also released open-source programming tools for Huawei's Ascend chips and helped optimize a supernode built around 128 Ascend 950 chips. Huawei prepared its CANN software with fused operators and optimizations for the chip's dual-core design ahead of the V4 launch.