Reuters reported on June 16 that two people familiar with the matter revealed that the U.S. government has not yet added Chinese artificial intelligence start-up DeepSeek, Chinese memory chip manufacturer Changxin Memory (CXMT), and more than 100 companies identified as posing national security risks to the U.S. Department of Commerce’s foreign trade “entity list” to avoid further exacerbating tensions with Beijing during this sensitive period.

People familiar with the matter said that these companies, including DeepSeek and Changxin Storage, had passed the review of an interdepartmental committee as early as last year and were approved to be included in the entity list managed by the U.S. Department of Commerce’s Bureau of Industry and Security (BIS), but relevant updates have not been released to the public. The number of companies that have been delayed in announcing this time exceeds 100. This is the first time that Reuters has disclosed the size of this group of companies that have been approved but have not yet been listed on the entity list.

According to a previous statement from a senior US State Department official to Reuters, DeepSeek, a Chinese startup that shocked the technology industry in early 2025 with its low-cost large-scale model, is accused of supporting China's military and intelligence operations and trying to use Southeast Asian shell companies to illegally obtain advanced US chips. This year, U.S. AI company Anthropic said it identified DeepSeek and two other Chinese AI labs on the Claude platform as trying to "extract" capabilities to improve their own models; OpenAI also warned U.S. lawmakers that DeepSeek was targeting its models in a similar manner.

Changxin Storage has been listed as a "Chinese-funded military industrial enterprise" by the U.S. Department of Defense during the Biden administration. The U.S. Department of Commerce considered adding Changxin Storage to the entity list more than a year ago. Once officially added to the list, U.S. companies exporting goods, software and technology to it will have to obtain licenses, and relevant licenses are often denied in practice. DeepSeek and Changxin Storage have yet to publicly respond to the above statement. The Bureau of Industry and Security of the U.S. Department of Commerce also did not directly explain why it has not released an update to the Entity List since last year, nor did it comment on the specific situation of DeepSeek and Changxin Storage. It only emphasized in a statement that the Bureau "uses a variety of policies and law enforcement tools, including the Entity List, every day to ensure that bad actors are contained."

In the broader context, competition between the United States and China continues to intensify in the fields of technology, trade, and national security. On the one hand, Washington attempts to limit China's development in advanced technology through tariffs and export controls; on the other hand, Beijing maintains a high degree of control over rare earth resources needed for the defense, automobile and chip manufacturing industries. An American think tank scholar who studies the global supply chain pointed out that the United States has not added new entities to the Entity List since October last year, which is the longest interval in more than ten years. He described the Entity List as "like a game of whack-a-mole, and we must keep taking action." He also warned that the stagnation of new additions to the list may allow more American technologies to flow into the hands of potential adversaries.

Former U.S. Department of Commerce official Kevin Curland believes that the fact that there have been no new cases on the entity list since October last year shows that trade policy has, to a certain extent, trumped the use of this key national security tool. According to people familiar with the matter, a number of Chinese companies have been listed by the interdepartmental committee for supplying drones to Russia. Some drone wreckage previously discovered in Poland was traced to these companies; for US suppliers, those less well-known companies need to be listed in order to identify the nature of their business and prevent indirect supply risks.

Another source said that dozens of Chinese companies selling restricted versions of NVIDIA chips to Chinese universities were identified as national security risks last year, but were also not officially added to the entity list. In addition, some companies that manufacture and sell drones and "robot dogs" for the Chinese military have also been selected as potential targets. Since the end of 2025, multiple people familiar with the matter have stated that the current U.S. Department of Commerce Under Secretary for Industry and Security Affairs, Jeffrey Kessler, prefers to avoid adding new Chinese entities to prevent further escalation of Sino-U.S. relations.

Observers pointed out that the stagnation of this round of entity list updates reflects the "implementation capacity dilemma" of the U.S. Department of Commerce's Bureau of Industry and Security during the second term of the current administration: including the inability to formulate or implement new export control rules in a timely manner. For example, the agency announced as early as last year that it would replace a key regulation formulated during the Biden administration to control global access to U.S.-sourced AI chips. However, so far it has not issued a new version of the rules, nor has it strictly implemented the old regulations. This has been seen by the outside world as leaving potential loopholes for Chinese companies (especially entities registered outside China) to obtain U.S. AI chips.

According to the procedure, whether to include an entity on the list is determined by an interagency committee, whose members include representatives of the U.S. Departments of Commerce, Defense, Energy, State, and, as appropriate, the Treasury Department. However, multiple people familiar with the matter said that the committee has approved some companies to be included in the list, but the Ministry of Commerce has yet to release relevant decisions. One of the sources revealed that at least 75 Chinese entities involved in advanced semiconductor production, semiconductor manufacturing equipment production and AI model development have passed the committee's review and are "intended to be blacklisted", but they are still unannounced.

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