US delays blacklisting DeepSeek, over 100 Chinese firms

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 US 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 US should cease “politicizing, instrumentalizing, and weaponizing” economic, trade and technological issues.

“China has consistently opposed the US’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.