Australia has banned DeepSeek AI services from all government systems and devices, becoming one of the first countries to take direct action against a Chinese artificial intelligence startup that shook Silicon Valley and global markets this year. Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke said in a statement Tuesday that all DeepSeek products, applications and services would be removed from government systems on national security grounds effective immediately. A threat assessment by the country's intelligence agencies found the technology posed an unacceptable risk, he said. Founded in Hangzhou only 20 months ago, DeepSeek's technology made waves in January with a new mobile app featuring its reasoning AI chatbot -- which articulates its approximation of thought process and research before delivering a response -- that seemed to suggest top-tier AI could be developed without huge investments in hardware. Its appeal took it to the top of worldwide download charts.

Since declaring his support for Donald Trump in July of last year and subsequently spending more than 250m on his re-election effort, Elon Musk has rapidly accumulated political influence and positioned himself at the heart of the new administration. Now as prominent as the president himself, Musk has begun to make use of that power, making decisions that could affect the health of millions of people, gaining access to highly sensitive personal data, and attacking anyone who opposes him. Musk, the world's richest man and an unelected official, has achieved an astonishing level of power over the federal government. Over the weekend, workers with Musk's "department of government efficiency" (Doge) clashed with civil servants over demands for unfettered access to the computer systems of major US government agencies in a breakneck series of confrontations. When the dust settled, several top officials who opposed the takeover had been pushed out, and Musk's allies had gained control. Musk, with the backing of Trump, is now working to shut down the US Agency for International Development (USAid) – the world's largest single supplier of humanitarian aid.

"There are only two types of networks, those that have been compromised and those that are compromised without the operator's awareness," wrote James Scott, senior fellow at the Institute for Critical Infrastructure Technology, in a collection of essays on next-generation cyber defenses. The writers, ICIT fellows and industry security experts, voiced a common theme: Cyber threats continue to pervade government systems and no one solution is a cure-all. The government sector is second only to the health care industry in system vulnerability and susceptibility to attack, based on total records breached, Scott wrote. In 2016, 36.6 million records were exposed, 13.9 million of which came from government systems. Between 2010 and 2016, he said, federal and state agencies publicly disclosed 203 breaches, and there was a 40 percent increase in public-sector data breaches in 2016.