The Trump administration has held off adding China’s AI startup DeepSeek, memory chipmaker CXMT, and more than 100 other companies identified as national security risks to a key U.S. trade blacklist. The decision suggests that the White House is trying to avoid further inflaming tensions with Beijing, even as officials inside the U.S. government have already approved many of the companies for restrictions. These firms were cleared last year by an interagency committee for inclusion on the Commerce Department’s Entity List, but the additions were never formally published.
The Entity List is one of Washington’s most important export-control tools. Once a company is placed on it, U.S. firms generally cannot ship goods, software, or technology to that company without a government license, and such licenses are often denied. That means the list can sharply restrict a target’s access to advanced American technology. Lack of updates is striking because the U.S. has not added any new entities since October, the longest such pause in more than a decade.
DeepSeek has become a particularly sensitive case. A senior State Department official said last year that the startup had supported China’s military and intelligence operations and had tried to use Southeast Asian shell companies to gain illegal access to advanced U.S. chips. Also, Anthropic said it uncovered a campaign by DeepSeek and two other Chinese AI labs to improperly extract capabilities from its Claude models, while OpenAI warned lawmakers that DeepSeek had also targeted its systems. Those allegations have helped make DeepSeek a symbol of the broader U.S.-China contest over advanced AI.
CXMT, meanwhile, is important because it is China’s leading memory chipmaker and had already been designated a Chinese military company by the Pentagon under the Biden administration. The fact that it was considered for the Entity List more than a year ago but still has not been added suggests that trade diplomacy is now overshadowing some national security measures. This pause has frustrated former U.S. officials and national security analysts, who argue that delaying blacklists allows more American technology to reach adversaries or suspected intermediaries.
The holdup extends far beyond just two companies. At least 75 Chinese entities involved in advanced semiconductor production, semiconductor equipment manufacturing, and AI modeling had already gone through the interagency process and were slated for blacklisting. Other Chinese firms allegedly linked to Russian drones recovered in Poland, to sales of restricted Nvidia chips to Chinese universities, and to Chinese military drone and robot-dog programs were also identified as potential targets.
Since late 2025, Jeffrey Kessler, the under secretary of commerce for industry and security, has sought to avoid listing additional Chinese entities for fear of escalating tensions between Washington and Beijing. That choice appears to fit a broader pattern at the Bureau of Industry and Security, where critics say the second Trump administration has struggled to issue new rules or enforce existing ones on advanced technology exports. For example, BIS had promised to replace a Biden-era rule governing global access to U.S.-origin AI chips, but had still not published a replacement and was no longer enforcing the earlier rule, creating a possible loophole.
China’s foreign ministry rejected the U.S. approach, saying Washington should stop “politicizing, instrumentalizing, and weaponizing” trade and technology issues. That response underlines the larger strategic fight: the U.S. wants to use export controls to slow China’s military and technological rise, while China argues that Washington is abusing national security as a pretext for economic containment.
Overall, the delay is a revealing sign of the administration’s priorities. Even though many firms have already been judged risky by the U.S. government, blacklisting them has been postponed in order to avoid worsening the trade and diplomatic confrontation with China. The result is a policy caught between two goals: protecting national security and managing a tense but vital economic relationship.
