Could Trump ban DeepSeek? What the TikTok ban saga tells us.

DeepSeek, a Chinese open-source AI system similar to ChatGPT, has risen to popularity at a peculiar time: in the midst of an ongoing legal battle over whether another Chinese tech platform, TikTok, should be allowed to run in the U.S. Some users are curious if the U.S. government would attempt to ban DeepSeek on the same grounds it has used to attempt to ban TikTok.

In short, sure, the U.S. could ban DeepSeek if it wanted to. It has the capacity to ban things it doesn't like from countries it doesn't trust in order to protect its citizens' data. In the case of TikTok, lawmakers who voted in support of banning the app cited concerns about data privacy, national security, surveillance, and propaganda, primarily 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 isn't in the U.S.'s interest to allow foreign adversaries access U.S. citizens' data. TikTok has routinely denied allegations that it shares U.S. users' data with the Chinese government.

This line of thinking could lay out some problems for DeepSeek, too. The company is based out of 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 in secure servers located in the People's Republic of China."

But the TikTok ban wasn't all purely due to privacy concerns — there were lobbying efforts afoot, too. Beyond that, there are also similar players involved in DeepSeek's rise to power. Meta and YouTube stand to benefit from a TikTok ban, and those tech companies, along with OpenAI and others, would also probably benefit from a ban on DeepSeek, which would let them better corner the AI market. Those power players aren't making any explicitly public moves just yet.

That said, President Donald Trump doesn't seem too concerned with the privacy issues at TikTok currently — at least, not enough to put the ban into effect — so it's unclear if he'll follow that same logic regarding DeepSeek. He did, however, sign a whole host of executive orders during the first week of his presidency, including one that tackles AI. The order revokes a Biden AI executive order "which hampered the private sector’s ability to innovate in AI by imposing government control over AI development and deployment" and "calls for departments and agencies to revise or rescind all policies, directives, regulations, orders, and other actions taken under the Biden AI order that are inconsistent with enhancing America’s leadership in AI." He did keep one 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 said on CNBC on Monday, banning an open-source model like DeepSeek wouldn't necessarily "bring the globe to our regime, our rule of law, speech rights regime, open-society regime," a theory that lines up with some legislators' take on the TikTok ban. "It actually leads the rest of the world to go a different direction for us."

"The president's capacity to take action here is massive against an app or an adversary he doesn't like," Former Rep. McHenry said. "We see this in tariffs; we're seeing this in tariffs moment to moment, hour to hour, and that will continue. But when it comes to export controls, the authorities of this administration, like the last one, are very broad, very deep, and quite meaningful."

Right now, it's unclear what the government might do regarding DeepSeek, but it has options.