Tennessee Governor Bill Lee has announced announced that two artificial intelligence (AI) tools with direct ties to the Chinese Communist Party are now banned on the state network.
Manus and DeepSeek have been added to a list of foreign-owned platforms that are now strictly prohibited due to serious threats regarding data privacy and cyber security. Tennessee becomes the first state in the Nation to ban the Alibaba-owned Manus platform, which launched on Thursday.
In addition to data privacy and cyber security threats, the Lee administration says the platforms promote Chinese propaganda and generate output that displays biases in areas such as race, gender, health, and religion, leading to discriminatory results.
Following Tennessee’s state ban on DeepSeek, the Tennessee Attorney General issued a consumer warning regarding the platform.