All products, applications and services made by the China-based AI company DeepSeek must be removed from federal government systems and devices and all Australian users have been encouraged to review any company's privacy policies to understand how their data is used.
"AI is a technology full of potential and opportunity - but the government will not hesitate to act when our agencies identify a national security risk," Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke said.
Australia's action follows similar moves made by the Taiwanese government, which banned its departments from using DeepSeek's services because of the risk it poses to information security, and the Commonwealth's 2023 decision to ban social media platform TikTok from government-issued devices.
DeepSeek's AI chatbot provides similar responses to pre-existing competitors despite being trained at a fraction of the cost and with significantly less computing power.
Its January launch prompted investors to question the valuation of other AI companies and led to a global tech stock rout that wiped almost $US600 billion ($A968 billion) from the market value of AI chip maker Nvidia in a single day.
Tony Burke says the government will not fail to act on matters of national security. (Mick Tsikas/AAP PHOTOS)
Mr Burke has said the ban was "country-agnostic and focused on the risk to the Australian government and our assets".
Federal Employment Minister Murray Watt said that as for the public, it was up to individuals to decide if they wanted to download and use the DeepSeek app.
"As a government, we're leaving the choice up to individuals for what apps they have on their phone," he told Seven on Wednesday.
"But the government has decided it is not secure to have on government phones and people might want to have a think about that."
Senator Watt also said the government will issue further information to help Australian citizens make that decision.
The Commonwealth has not placed a blanket government ban on similar services offered by American company OpenAI, despite concerns its AI assistant ChatGPT could incorporate sensitive information from prompts into its dataset, and later expose it.
The Department of Home Affairs has suspended access to ChatGPT and Google's AI assistant from its systems since May 2023, but its then-secretary Mike Pezullo called for a whole-of-government approach on whether or not to deploy the AI technologies.
In September, the federal government released voluntary guidelines on the use of AI in Australia.
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