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….