Indian Finance Ministry Banned ChatGPT, DeepSeek for its Employees: Here’s What We Know So Far

Indian Finance Ministry has refrain its employees from using AI chatbot and tools like ChatGPT and DeepSeek. The advisory has been issued to Finance Ministry employees citing security measures of using the AI chatbots and released a statement. The advisory is dated back to January 29 as per Reuters.

The advisory says, “It has been determined that AI tools and AI apps (such as ChatGPT, DeepSeek etc.) in the office computers and devices pose risks for confidentiality of (government) data and documents.”

As per Reuters, the note was issued internally and has confirmed the authenticity of the notice. However, representatives from ChatGPT and DeepSeek have not commented on anything officially. But keeping the current situation in mind, India might ban the usage of AI chatbots like ChatGPT and DeepSeek for its government officials. The notice was circulated to several other government departments including revenue, economic affairs, expenditure, public enterprises, and financial services.

Notably, there are other countries too that banned DeepSeek recently including Australia, the US, Taiwan, Italy, and more. Sam Altman, OpenAI’s CEO was recently in India amidst a legal battle that was initiated by domestic news agency ANI. The company is facing a huge legal battle from the country’s top media sites due to its usage of copyright infringement content on its popular platform ChatGPT. However, the company challenged the case by saying that it doesn’t have Indian servers or data centres so Indian courts don’t have the jurisdiction over content matters.

The ChatGPT and DeepSeek are not entirely banned in India, but they are surely restricted in government agencies due to the data security concerns. To recall, Indian government banned several Chinese apps in 2019 including PUBG, Garena Free Fire, TikTok, Shein, ShareIt, WeChat, ROMWE, and many others.