The governor of the US state of Texas, Greg Abbott, has banned the use of Chinese artificial intelligence application DeepSec on government-owned devices.

Abbott said in a statement on Saturday that he had banned the use of a number of Chinese applications on state computers, including Deep Sick, Red Note and Lemon8, a social networking application.

He stressed that the state would continue to protect and defend the country from “hostile foreign actors”.

Texas was the first US state to ban DeepSec.

On 20 January, DeepSec unveiled an artificial intelligence model in China that it developed at a lower cost and using fewer chips than other AI companies.