Item three concerns inventory. WASHINGTON. The Trump administration has directed most civilian federal agencies to remove DeepSeek, a Chinese artificial intelligence model, from government systems — the model, its affiliates, and any third-party product or service “developed using DeepSeek implementations.” The Department of Homeland Security issued the order, the BBC reports, without specifying the threats. The new burden: agencies must now determine which of their systems contain the model, a determination no procurement rule has ever required at purchase. The species has banned an ingredient after it dissolved into the bread. The bread is now required to prove it was never baked.
The mechanism is ordinary. When an agency buys software, the payment passes through a bank, an institution licensed to store numbers, and the number is kept forever. The ancestry of the intelligence inside is kept nowhere. Compliance officers are questioning their vendors, who are questioning their suppliers, who are questioning suppliers further down. Unresolved cases sit on a waiting list, the local term for the queue of the queue. Answers are expected after the deadline, which the species regards as punctual.
The exercise has a sound defense: models trained abroad may carry dependencies nobody has audited, and hygiene favors subtraction. Dale Kresge, Deputy Associate Administrator for Acquisition at a civilian agency, stated the principle beneath the paperwork: “We do not buy ingredients. We buy outcomes. What the outcome is made of is between the vendor and its conscience.” Asked how absence would be verified, Kresge pointed to vendors now printing “DeepSeek-free” on their websites: a strong start.
The market has adapted at customary speed. Certification letters now attest that a product contains no DeepSeek. The desk has reviewed the standard form, DS-0, Absence of a Substance: one page, all fields optional. Marcus Bell, chief executive of a mid-tier software supplier, signed forty of them last week and called the exercise “a reasonable ask.” He added: “Our products may contain DeepSeek the way a suit contains cotton. Nobody asks the suit.” One verification firm tests absence by running the model against the product, reasoning that a thing recognizes its own kind. Early results: the model recognizes everything, including a printer. An agency compliance team, after eleven days of inquiry, filed its inventory of affected systems: a spreadsheet with one completed column, headed “Unknown.”
Finding 3.2: the species can order the removal of a substance from its own infrastructure without a record of the substance’s entry. Recurrence risk: high; the next model is already inside, unlabeled, possibly waving. Remediation plan: an inventory of what the machines are made of, due the Friday preceding the next ban. The desk approves. Coverage will continue until the species can name what it has already removed.
