Microsoft Vice Chairman and President Brad Smith said at a Senate hearing today that Microsoft employees are not allowed to use DeepSeek for data security and publicity reasons. "At Microsoft, we do not allow our employees to use the DeepSeek app," Smith said, referring to DeepSeek's app service, which is available on desktop and mobile devices.
Smith said Microsoft did not list DeepSeek in its app store due to these concerns. While many organizations and countries have placed restrictions on DeepSeek, this is the first time Microsoft has publicly announced such a ban.
Smith said the restrictions stemmed from the risk of data being stored in China and the possibility that DeepSeek's responses could be influenced by "Chinese propaganda."
DeepSeek's privacy policy states that user data is stored on servers in China. Such data is regulated by Chinese law and would require cooperation with Chinese intelligence agencies. DeepSeek also heavily censors topics that the Chinese government considers sensitive.
Despite Smith's criticism of DeepSeek, Microsoft made DeepSeek's R1 model available on its Azure cloud service earlier this year, soon after DeepSeek's popularity grew.
But this is a bit different from the chatbot application itself that DeepSeek provides. DeepSeek is open source, so anyone can download the model, store it on their own servers, and serve it to customers without sending data back to China.
However, this doesn't eliminate other risks, such as widespread advertising of the model or the generation of insecure code.
Smith said at the Senate hearing that Microsoft successfully gained access to DeepSeek's AI model and "modified" it to eliminate "harmful side effects." Microsoft did not elaborate on what it did with the DeepSeek model.
When DeepSeek was first released on Azure, Microsoft wrote that DeepSeek underwent "rigorous red team testing and security assessments" before being deployed on Azure.
DeepSeek's app is also a direct competitor to Microsoft's internet search chat app Copilot, but Microsoft hasn't removed all such chat competitors from the Windows App Store.
Perplexity, for example, is available in the Windows Store. But apps from Google, Microsoft's main rival, such as the Chrome browser and Google's chatbot Gemini, didn't show up in Web Store search results.