Sault Ste. Marie city council to consider banning Chinese AI chatbot

Sault Ste. Marie city council will consider a motion at its Monday meeting to look into blocking the Chinese AI chatbot, DeepSeek, from city devices and networks.

The motion asks staff to create a plan for blocking the service and report back to council.

Councillors would then vote on proceeding with the plan.

Councillor. Stephan Kinach is moving the motion after successfully passing a similar one last year to ban the Chinese-owned social media app, TikTok, from city devices.

Kinach said he's read articles warning of security concerns with DeepSeek, and noted that Shared Services Canada has blocked the service on federal government networks and devices it oversees.

"Cybersecurity should be top of mind for most levels of governments," he said.

"Even this week in northern Ontario, they had a compromise in the Rainbow District School Board, and it was more serious than they let on [at] the beginning."

Robust cybersecurity policies will help the city maintain its insurance and possibly reduce its premiums, Kinach added.

Kinach is concerned about DeepSeek because of its ties to Communist Party-run China, he said, and because of concerns he's read in security articles about possible unauthorized access to names, email addresses, telephone numbers, dates of birth, text or audio inputs, prompts, uploaded files, and chat histories. 

Australia and South Korea have both banned the service on government networks.

"It's better to be on top of these policies and not be reacting to them once we get hacked or something is compromised," Kinach said.

"It's just good housekeeping to have policies like this to protect us from possible future events … because we don't want to be put in a position where we have to call all our … residents and say 'Your information has been compromised because our system has been hacked.'"

Kinach's fellow councillor, Marchy Bruni has seconded the motion.

"My worry is regarding the unauthorized access to names and the emails and the telephone numbers and the dates of birth," Bruni said.