The ban also includes Lemon8, the social media app owned by TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance.
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott on Jan. 31 issued a ban on the Chinese artificial intelligence (AI) app DeepSeek and five other Chinese-owned social media apps from government-issued devices.
State employees and contractors will not be allowed to download or use the banned apps on both state-owned and personal devices they use for work, according to the governor’s statement.
The ban includes DeepSeek and Chinese social media apps Lemon8, owned by TikTok’s parent company ByteDance, and Xingyin Information’s RedNote (also known as Xiaohongshu), as well as Chinese-owned stock trading apps Moomoo, Tiger Brokers, and Webull—all of which were identified in the proclamation order as posing “a security risk” to the state of Texas.
Abbott said the ban is intended to protect state agencies and employees who manage the state’s critical infrastructure, intellectual property, and personal information from what he referred to as “malicious espionage operations” by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in Beijing.
“Texas will not allow the Chinese Communist Party to infiltrate our state’s critical infrastructure through data-harvesting AI and social media apps,” the governor stated. “Texas will continue to protect and defend our state from hostile foreign actors.”
The state has already banned the use of TikTok on government-issued devices in December 2022 due to concerns that the Chinese regime could access sensitive data through the app, citing Beijing’s national intelligence law that requires all entities in China to hand over user data if the CCP authorities ask them to.
Over the past two months, Abbott has issued four directives aimed at safeguarding state agencies from the CCP influence, including ordering the arrest of criminals executing CCP influence operations and requiring state agencies to “fully divest” from China, according to his statement.
DeepSeek has sparked data privacy concerns following the launch of its free open-source AI model earlier this month. The app is controlled by Hangzhou DeepSeek Artificial Intelligence and Beijing DeepSeek Artificial Intelligence, according to its privacy policy webpage.
The White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters on Jan. 28 that the government is looking into the potential national security implications of the DeepSeek AI app.
