Brad Smith, the vice chairman and president of Microsoft, dropped a bombshell during a Senate hearing today: Microsoft employees are banned from using the buzzworthy DeepSeek. This step, Smith explained, is due to the data security and propaganda worries surrounding the app.

During the hearing, Smith put it simply: "At Microsoft, we don't allow our team members to use the DeepSeek app." He spoke about DeepSeek's PC and mobile tools. Apparently, Microsoft's concerns about DeepSeek have also hindered the app from making it into their app store.

This is the maiden time for Microsoft to broadcast such a prohibition, even though DeepSeek has met with restrictions from a fair number of organizations and countries.

Smith argues that the main issues are the possible risks of keeping data in China and the potential for DeepSeek to be affected by "Chinese propaganda.” In fact, DeepSeek’s privacy policy mentions its practice of storing user data on Chinese servers, which naturally comes under the jurisdiction of Chinese law, compelling cooperation with the nation’s intelligence operations. Moreover, DeepSeek supposedly plays down topics viewed as sensitive by the Chinese government.

However, despite these red flags, Microsoft shared DeepSeek’s viral R1 model on its Azure cloud service a while back.

Making DeepSeek’s chatbot app available is a separate matter from offering the model. DeepSeek being open source enables anyone to download the model, store it locally, and cater to their clients without feeding any data back to China.

Of course, there are threats that cannot be tossed aside, such as the model potentially propagating propaganda or producing unsecure code.

Microsoft was able to "alter" DeepSeek's AI model by diving deeply into it, Smith revealed at the Senate hearing, with the goal of eliminating "harmful side effects." Unresolved are the specifics of the changes made to DeepSeek's model, but Microsoft led TechCrunch to Smith's words.

When Microsoft initially launched DeepSeek on Azure, they noted that the model had undergone “rigorous red teaming and safety evaluations” before landing on Azure.

It's interesting to consider that though DeepSeek's software is a direct competitor of Microsoft's Copilot internet search chat app, Microsoft continues to exclude all chat competitors from its Windows app store.

Case in point: Perplexity is up and running in the Windows app store. But we noticed that the apps from Microsoft’s eternal nemesis, Google (including the Chrome browser and Google’s chatbot Gemini) didn’t pop up in our webstore search.