US held back blacklisting DeepSeek
The U.S. has held off adding China's AI startup DeepSeek, memory chipmaker CXMT and more than 100 other companies flagged as national security risks to
The U.S. has held off adding China's AI startup DeepSeek, memory chipmaker CXMT and more than 100 other companies flagged as national security risks to a trade blacklist, according to two people familiar with the matter, as the Trump administration tries to avoid escalating tensions with Beijing.DeepSeek, CXMT and other companies were approved by an interagency committee last year for addition to the Commerce Department's Entity List, which is being reported for the first time. Reuters is also exclusively reporting the large number of companies awaiting publication on the list.DeepSeek, whose low-cost AI model sent shockwaves through the technology world in January 2025, has supported China's military and intelligence operations, a senior U.S. State Department official told Reuters last year, adding that the startup tried to use Southeast Asian shell companies to illegally access advanced U.S. chips. This year, Anthropic said it identified a campaign by DeepSeek and two other Chinese AI labs to illicitly extract capabilities from its Claude AI platform to improve their own models, and OpenAI warned lawmakers that DeepSeek also was targeting its models.ChangXin Memory Technologies, China's top memory chipmaker, was designated as a Chinese military company by the Defense Department under the Biden administration. The Commerce Department considered placing it on its Entity List more than a year ago, Reuters and others reported.U.S. companies cannot ship goods, software and technology to companies on the list without a license, which is likely to be denied.DeepSeek and CXMT could not be reached for comment outside normal business hours.
The Commerce Department's Bureau of Industry and Security, which oversees the list, did not directly respond to questions about why updates to the Entity List had not been published since last year, or comment on DeepSeek and CXMT.The bureau uses "many policy and enforcement tools, including the Entity List... on a daily basis to ensure we are combating bad actors," BIS said in a statement. When asked for comment, China's foreign ministry said the U.S. should cease "politicizing, instrumentalizing, and weaponizing" economic, trade and technological issues. "China has consistently opposed the U.S.'s broad interpretation of the concept of national security and its abuse of export control measures, such as the Entity List, to contain and suppress Chinese enterprises," spokesperson Lin Jian said at a regular news briefing on Wednesday.TENSE RIVALRYThe United States and China are locked in a tense rivalry over technology, trade and national security, with Washington using tariffs and export controls to keep Beijing at bay while China maintains a stranglehold on rare earth minerals that defense, auto and chipmaking firms need.The U.S. has not posted any additions to its Entity List since October, the longest stretch between new postings in more than a decade, said Philip Luck, who studies global supply chains at the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies."The Entity List is like whack-a-mole and you've got to keep whacking the moles," Luck said, referring to an arcade game.The lack of new listings is likely allowing American technology to reach adversaries who could use it against the U.S., he added."The fact the U.S. hasn't put any companies on the Entity List since October demonstrates that trade policy is overshadowing the use of a critical national security tool," said Kevin Kurland, a former Commerce Department official.Multiple Chinese companies were slated for the list for supplying Russian drones that were recovered in Poland last September, one of the people said.
The BriefWire