According to Decrypt, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security has ordered federal civilian agencies to remove DeepSeek and any services built on it, and to stop procuring them. The key phrase is “and any services built on it.” This means the ban targets not only products that call the DeepSeek API directly, but the entire downstream dependency chain. For teams building AI agents, the question is no longer whether the primary model uses DeepSeek, but whether any middleware, RAG tools, or fine-tuning frameworks they use contain its code. Banning a single low-level component could make the entire tech stack noncompliant.