Microsoft vice chairman and president Brad Smith said at a Senate hearing today that Microsoft employees are not allowed to use DeepSeek due to data security and publicity issues.

"At Microsoft, we do not allow our employees to use the DeepSeek app," Smith said.

Smith said Microsoft hasn't put DeepSeek in its app store either.

Although many organizations and even countries have imposed restrictions on DeepSeek, this is the first time that Microsoft has released such a ban.

Smith said the restrictions stem from the risk that data will be stored in China, and DeepSeek's answer could be affected by "Chinese propaganda."

DeepSeek's privacy policy states that it stores user data on Chinese servers. Such data is subject to Chinese law that requires cooperation with the country's intelligence agencies. DeepSeek also severely reviews topics that the Chinese government considers to be sensitive.

Despite Smith's critical comments on DeepSeek, Microsoft provided the R1 model to DeepSeek's Azure Cloud Service shortly after it started the virus earlier this year.

But this is a little different from the chatbot app that provides DeepSeek itself. Since DeepSeek is open source, anyone can download the model, store it on their own servers, and make it available to customers without sending data back to China.

However, this does not eliminate other risks, such as model propaganda or generating unsafe code.

During the Senate hearing, Smith said Microsoft managed to get into DeepSeek's AI model and "changed" it to eliminate "harmful side effects." Microsoft has not elaborated on everything it has done to DeepSeek's model, mentioning TechCrunch to Smith's speech.

Microsoft wrote in its initial launch of DeepSeek on Azure that DeepSeek conducted a “rigorous red team and security assessment” before using Azure.

While we can't help but point out that DeepSeek's app is also a direct competitor to Microsoft's own Copilot Internet search chat app, Microsoft has not banned all such chat competitors in its Windows App Store.

For example, there is confusion in the Windows App Store. Although no app from Microsoft's Artrival Google (including Chrome and Google's Chatbot Gemini) has surfaced in our web store searches.