Kansas Banned DeepSeek on State Devices. Here's the Law and Why It Matters.

Photo by Towfiqu Barbhuiya on Unsplash

In April 2025, Kansas passed a law banning state employees from using DeepSeek — and any other AI platform controlled by a foreign adversary nation — on state-owned devices and networks. The law is short, the policy rationale is defensible, and it’s part of a wave of state-level AI security legislation that mirrors what the federal government has been doing at the agency level.

This isn’t surprising. What’s interesting is the specificity of the statutory language and the addition of genetic sequencer restrictions that most people covering the bill ignored.

What the Law Prohibits

Kansas Senate Substitute for HB 2313 does three things:

First, no state-owned electronic device and no state-operated network may be used to access an “artificial intelligence platform of concern.”

Second, any state agency that currently uses or has an account with an AI platform of concern must deactivate and delete that account and stop using the platform.

Third — and this is the part most coverage missed — no medical facility or research facility receiving state funds may use genetic sequencers or genetic analysis software produced by a foreign adversary, state-owned enterprise, or company domiciled in a foreign adversary nation.

That third piece is about BGI and MGI — the Chinese genomics companies whose equipment is widely used in U.S. research institutions. Kansas is cutting off state funding for labs using that equipment. The policy concern is that genetic data collected by Chinese-controlled sequencing equipment could be transmitted to the Chinese government. It’s the same theory behind the proposed federal BGI restrictions, applied at the state level.

What Counts as an “AI Platform of Concern”

The statute defines this as:

(A) The artificial intelligence model commonly referred to as DeepSeek and any artificial intelligence model that is owned or controlled, directly or indirectly, by Hangzhou DeepSeek Artificial Intelligence Basic Technology Research Company or a subsidiary or successor company of such company; or (B) an artificial intelligence model that is controlled, directly or indirectly, by a country of concern.

Countries of concern: China (including Hong Kong), Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Russia, and Venezuela. Taiwan is explicitly excluded — “country of concern does not include the republic of China (Taiwan).”

So the ban isn’t just DeepSeek. It’s any AI model controlled by any of those governments. That’s a meaningful scope — if a covered AI company is state-owned or state-controlled under any of those regimes, Kansas state employees can’t use it on state equipment.

The “controlled, directly or indirectly” language is the interesting one. A Chinese company with minority government equity participation could potentially fall in scope. Whether Kansas regulators will actually try to analyze corporate control structures for every AI product is a different question.

The Carve-Out

State agencies can still access platforms of concern on state equipment for:

Law enforcement activities
Cybersecurity investigations

That’s a sensible exception. You can’t investigate threats if you can’t interact with them. Your threat intelligence team needs to be able to look at the things they’re monitoring.

How This Fits the Broader Pattern

This law is Kansas doing what the federal government has been doing to TikTok at the agency level, applied to AI platforms. The executive orders restricting TikTok on federal devices went through agency guidance and rule-making. Kansas put it in statute.

The FBI and CISA have both issued advisories warning that Chinese-controlled AI models pose data security risks — that query data sent to these models could be accessible to the Chinese government under PRC national security law. Kansas’s legislature read those advisories and made the policy choice to legislate.

The law doesn’t apply to private citizens or private companies in Kansas. State employees on state devices, state-funded medical and research facilities. If you work at a Kansas company and want to use DeepSeek on your personal laptop, the statute doesn’t touch you.

What This Means If You Sell to Kansas State Government

If you’re selling AI products or services to Kansas state agencies, your procurement conversations just got a new question: does your product incorporate any AI components from foreign adversary nations? If your product makes API calls to a model that’s developed or controlled by a covered entity, your Kansas state customers have a compliance problem.

Get ahead of this. Prepare a clear statement of what AI models or components your product uses, where they’re developed, and who controls the underlying companies. State procurement officers will start asking, and “we don’t know” is not an answer they’ll accept.

My Take

The national security rationale for AI platform restrictions is real. PRC national security law does require covered Chinese companies to cooperate with intelligence agencies. Sending sensitive government queries to a model that might be subject to that law is a genuine risk. Kansas’s legislature made a reasonable policy call.

The genetic sequencer provision is arguably more significant from a long-term security perspective — genomic data is uniquely sensitive and uniquely durable. Restricting Chinese-controlled sequencing equipment in state-funded research is the kind of measure that looks obvious in retrospect and takes years to actually implement. Getting ahead of it now is correct.

The law is blunt, which is usually what you want from a statute. The ambiguities — who counts as “controlled” by a foreign adversary — will create compliance questions that regulators will have to address. But the direction is right.

You can find the original text of Kansas HB 2313 on the Kansas Legislature’s website.