China has hit back at the Australian government’s banning of DeepSeek on all public sector devices, labelling it “ideological discrimination”.

Services offered by Chinese AI company DeepSeek have been banned from Australian government systems and devices.

Australia has banned DeepSeek from all government devices and systems over what it says is the security risk the Chinese artificial intelligence (AI) startup poses. DeepSeek stunned the world in January when it unveiled a chatbot which matched the performance level of US rivals, while claiming it had a much lower training cost.

Australia has banned DeepSeek from all government devices on the advice of security agencies, a top official said Wednesday, citing privacy and malware risks posed by China's breakout AI program.

After considering threat and risk analysis, I have determined that the use of DeepSeek products, applications and web services poses an unacceptable level of security risk to the Australian Government.