Australia has followed Taiwan's lead by banning the use of the DeepSeek R1 artificial intelligence (AI) model on all government-owned computers and smartphones. The order was issued by Home Affairs Secretary Stephanie Foster after seeing the security risks to the Australian government.
The ban is in the form of the use of DeepSeek R1 through websites and applications installed on government-owned devices. Starting today, non-corporate entities in the Australian commonwealth must ensure that their products, applications and web services do not use the DeepSeek R1 model.
Australia has become the first Five Eyes country to ban the use of the model developed by the Chinese company. At the same time, Microsoft recently said it wants to support DeepSeek R1 on all Copilt+ PCs by running it directly from machines without an internet connection.