North Dakota university system bans DeepSeek from network
Taking a page from federal, state and local government agencies that have banned the Chinese AI app DeepSeek, the University of North Dakota system last month instituted its own ban of the software.
Federal agencies and state governments have instated bans on DeepSeek as part of their routine prohibitions against technology that could contain backdoors or collect personal information for rival governments.
Administrators announced the ban during a North Dakota State Board of Higher Education meeting on March 27.
“I want to thank Core Technology Services and several of our campuses who realized that there were a number of students who had started to download DeepSeek on their computers,” NDUS Chancellor Mark Hagerott said in a press release. “We did block this the day before the NSA came out and said people should out of an abundance of caution.”
DeepSeek made waves in January upon releasing its open source R1 model, a large language model offering competitive performance but that operates at only a fraction of the cost.
The NDUS ban follows DeepSeek bans by other universities, including in Virginia, where numerous institutions updated their policies to adhere to a statewide ban on using the app.
