Can Trump Stop Deepseek? What the Tiktok Ban saga tells us.

Deepseek, a Chinese open-source AI system similar to Chatgpt, has grown in popularity at a peculiar time: amid an ongoing legal battle over whether another Chinese tech platform, Tiktok, should be allowed to run in the US some users are some users I wonder if the US government would try to ban Deepseek on the same grounds it has used to try to ban tiktok.

In short, the US could certainly stop Deepseek if it wanted to. It has the ability to ban things it doesn’t like from countries it doesn’t believe in protecting its citizens’ data. In the case of Tiktok, lawmakers who voted to ban the app cited concerns about data privacy, national security, surveillance and propaganda, largely due to the app’s Chinese ownership. These lawmakers argue that Tiktok is controlled by a “foreign adversary” — in this case, its Chinese parent company, Bytedance — and it is not in the U.S. interest to allow foreign adversaries to access the data of American citizens. Tiktok has routinely denied allegations that it shares US user data with the Chinese government.

This line of thinking could create some problems for Deepseek as well. The company is based in China. According to its privacy policy, “The personal information we collect from you may be stored on a server located outside of the country where you live. We store the information we collect on secure servers located in the People’s Republic of China.”

But the Tiktok ban wasn’t all simply due to privacy concerns — there were lobbying efforts as well. Beyond that, there are similar players involved in powering Deepseek. Meta and YouTube stand to benefit from a tiktok ban, and those tech companies, along with Openai and others, would also benefit from a Deepseek ban, which would let them better corner the market of AI. Those power players aren’t making any clearly public moves yet.

That said, President Donald Trump doesn’t seem too concerned with privacy issues on Tiktok right now — at least, not enough to enforce the ban — so it’s unclear whether he’ll follow the same logic with Deepseek. However, he signed a slew of executive orders during the first week of his presidency, including one dealing with AI. The order revokes a Biden AI executive order “that impeded the ability of the private sector to innovate in AI by imposing government control over the development and deployment of AI” and “calls on departments and agencies to review or rescind all policies, directives, regulations, orders, and other Actions taken at the behest of Biden AI that are inconsistent with increasing America’s leadership in AI.” He held up a Biden-era order that designates more federal land for AI data centers, NPR reported. This works alongside the Stargate project that Openai announced alongside Trump last week.

As former Rep. Patrick McHenry on CNBC on Monday, banning an open source model like Deepseek would not “bring the globe to our regime, our rule of law, our free speech regime, our open society regime,” a theory that It’s up to some lawmakers to take on the tiktok ban. “It really makes the rest of the world go a different direction for us.”

“The president’s ability to take action here is massive against an application or an opponent he doesn’t like,” said former Rep. McHenry. “We see it in tariffs; we’re seeing it in tariffs moment by moment, hour by hour, and it’s going to continue. But when it comes to export controls, the authorities of this administration, like the last one, are very broad, very deep, and quite significant.”

Right now, it’s unclear what the government can do about Deepseek, but it has options.