Where: Pennsylvania Capital-Star, ‘DeepSeek AI banned from all Pennsylvania Treasury-issued devices'
Who: Sarah Rajtmajer, assistant professor, Penn State College of Information Sciences and Technology
What: Citing concerns about privacy and security, Pennsylvania Treasurer Stacy Garrity has banned the use of DeepSeek, a Chinese-owned artificial intelligence (AI) platform from all Treasury-issued devices, including laptops, cell phones and others capable of connecting to the internet.
Sarah Rajtmajer was quoted in the Capital-Star story and said she thinks Garrity’s reasons for banning the DeepSeek AI are valid.
“DeepSeek is a Chinese company, and, like all large language models, it ingests vast amounts of often personal information to perform its tasks,” Rajtmajer said. “So, if they don’t trust the model — if they’ve decided that that’s not smart for security reasons — then I think that would be a reason to say, ‘Okay, we do not want to be handing over data that we don’t know what individuals will be sharing.'"
Rajtmajer said people are using large language models like DeepSeek and ChatGPT for a lot of things that are varied and creative, meaning anyone can type anything into those prompts.
“I think it’s cautious, but probably smart, if you’re worried about where that data is going, to be careful,” she said.
Since DeepSeek is relatively new, Rajtmajer doesn’t think banning it on Treasury devices will have a big impact on the current day-to-day operations of the office.
“There are plenty of other large language models,” she added. “DeepSeek is not the only one, so I can’t imagine that this will have a major impact, aside from social or economic impacts possibly related to the signaling of this move. From a technical standpoint, DeepSeek is lightweight and powerful and very interesting to the technical community, because it is an open weight model. It is very exciting, technically speaking, but just with respect to day-to-day operations, I can’t imagine that it’s deeply embedded in what they’ve been doing because it’s so new.”
Rajtmajer also provided a warning that any individual who uses any large language model should use caution because their data may be shared with a third party.
“Privacy is at risk for individuals, regardless of whether the company is DeepSeek or ChatGPT,” Rajtmajer told the Capital-Star. “And that from their perspective, they should use both with equal awareness of the personal information that they share.”