Belgian federal government staff are no longer permitted to use applications of the Chinese AI DeepSeek system.
Federal government employees are no longer allowed to use applications of the Chinese AI system DeepSeek. All applications must be removed from staff members' work devices by 1 December, a circular recently published by the government modernisation minister Vanessa Matz (Francophone centrist Les Engagés) instructs. The AI language model DeepSeek is considered to be the Chinese counterpart of America’s ChatGPT. However, privacy concerns are being raised in many countries.
The decision to ban the Chinese model from federal government services came after an analysis by Belgium’s Centre for Cybersecurity. ‘Following this analysis and taking into account the risks in terms of the protection of data transmitted to the DeepSeek system, it has been decided preventively to ban the Chinese system from federal government workplaces,’ Matz said earlier. ‘Banning the use of this system is a matter of vigilance. We guarantee that our government services are a safe, secure and an exemplary environment.’
The federal government includes federal government departments, autonomous government agencies, administrative public institutions, the public prosecutor's office, the defence ministry and the federal police. The ban also applies to staff mobile phones: ‘phones whose subscription or usage costs or purchase are partly or fully paid for by the government’.