The US has placed dozens of Chinese companies on an export blacklist. It is the first significant attempt by the Trump administration to impede China’s development of cutting-edge artificial intelligence processors, hypersonic missiles, and military-related technologies.
At least 70 Chinese groups were added to the “entity list” by the US Commerce Department on Tuesday. American businesses selling technology to China will now require a license. However, such license requests are likely to be denied.
In 2023, the Biden administration included Inspur (a cloud computing company) on the entity list. The company worked with Intel and another chipmaker based in Taiwan. However, the administration left off its subsidiaries, for which it received significant criticism.
Now, six Chinese subsidiaries of Inspur have been added to the entity list. According to the US, the subsidiaries were targeted because they assisted with the development of military-use supercomputers and acquired US-made technology to support initiatives for the People’s Liberation Army and China. The US stated that the subsidiaries had created sophisticated chips and large AI models for military applications.
Howard Lutnick, the US commerce secretary, said, “We will not allow adversaries to exploit American technology to bolster their own militaries and threaten American lives.”
He further added, “We are committed to using every tool at the department’s disposal to ensure our most advanced technologies stay out of the hands of those who seek to harm Americans.”
VP Vance also expressed similar viewpoints at the AI Action Summit in Paris earlier.
🚨🔥VP Vance at AI Action Summit in Paris:
— Benny Johnson (@bennyjohnson) February 11, 2025
“We've watched as hostile foreign adversaries have weaponized AI software to rewrite history, surveil users, and censor speech… I want to be clear.. this administration will block such efforts, full stop.”
pic.twitter.com/oeV95rOWGl
The United States has not publicly shown any proof that the Beijing Academy of Artificial Intelligence has supported China’s military modernization. However, it has been added to the list alongside other tech groups. Founded in 2018 to bridge the gap between academia and industry, BAAI is a non-profit AI research center. It hosts an annual conference to bring together AI experts and frequently releases open-source AI models and other tools.
Beijing’s BAAI called it a “mistake” and requested that Washington remove it from the list
BAAI called the US government’s move to place it on a trade blacklist a “mistake” and requested Washington to reverse the action.
As a “non-governmental, non-profit research institution” that has made its research findings publicly available, the Beijing-based organization expressed its disappointment. It stated that “AI is a public good for human beings, and it is an inevitable trend for AI to be open source.”
It further said that the US Commerce Department’s ruling has “seriously undermined open cooperation in global AI.” The institution added that it is dedicated to the non-profit business model and open-source ideals and that it would keep sharing the findings of its cutting-edge research with the public.
“[BAAI is] committed to frontier, strategic, and original research and breakthroughs in the AI field,” The organization’s leader, Wang Zhongyuan, stated in a keynote address at a conference for the industry.
Wang further added, “In the past few years, BAAI has made extraordinary contributions to technologies that propelled the whole industry’s development.”
Several other Chinese groups have been targeted
Additionally, the US targeted four groups that develop exascale superconductors for military applications, including nuclear weapons modeling: Henan Dingxin Information Industry, Nettrix Information Industry, Suma Technology, and Suma-USI Electronics.
According to Washington, the organizations gave manufacturing capabilities to Sugon, a developer of cutting-edge computer servers, which was included on the entity list in 2019 for developing supercomputers for military use.
The US has “time and again overstretched the concept of national security and abused state power to go after Chinese companies,” according to the Chinese embassy in Washington.
Liu Pengyu, the embassy spokesperson, said, “We firmly oppose these acts taken by the US and demand that it immediately stop using military-related issues as pretexts to politicize, instrumentalize, and weaponize trade and tech issues, and stop abusing export control tools such as entity lists to keep Chinese companies down.”
The new list also includes 10 companies based in the UAE, China, and South Africa due to their ties to the Test Flying Academy of South Africa. The flight school was added to Washington’s entity list in 2023.
During the previous term, the Biden administration placed export restrictions on China that targeted AI processors and quantum computing. However, it was criticized for not closing gaps that allowed certain Chinese businesses to evade regulations. The updated entity list fills those gaps.
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