The Ministry of Finance has advised its employees against using AI tools like ChatGPT and DeepSeek for official work, citing concerns over the confidentiality of government data and documents, an internal advisory revealed.
“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,” said the advisory by the finance ministry dated January 29.
Three finance ministry officials confirmed to Reuters that the advisory was authentic and had been issued internally this week.
Countries like Australia and Italy have imposed similar restrictions on DeepSeek over data security concerns. Reports of the advisory emerged on social media on Tuesday, just ahead of OpenAI chief Sam Altman’s scheduled visit to India on Wednesday, during which he is also set to meet the IT minister.
The advisory follows IT Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw’s recent announcement that DeepSeek R1, developed by the Chinese company DeepSeek, will soon be hosted on Indian servers to address data privacy concerns.
“The good thing is that Deepseek is an open-source model, and we are very soon going to host DeepSeek on Indian servers, the way we have hosted Llama (large language model/generative AI model developed by Meta AI) on India servers,” said Vaishnaw.
He further stated that all apps and systems would undergo evaluation for data privacy policies and security parameters, with decisions being made based on the assessment.
“Everything that is open source can be taken and hosted on our server so data privacy parameters can be addressed, and that we are going to do soon,” the minister said.
The minister stated that details, including the number of servers needed to host the DeepSeek V3 foundational model, have already been finalized.
