US holds off blacklisting China’s DeepSeek, more than 100 firms deemed security risks, sources say

DeepSeek and other companies were approved by an interagency committee in 2025 for addition to the Commerce Department’s Entity List.

WASHINGTON - The US 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 in 2025 for addition to the Commerce Department’s Entity List, which is being reported for the first time.

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 in 2025, adding that the start-up tried to use South-east Asian shell companies to illegally access advanced US chips.

Anthropic said earlier in 2026 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.

US companies cannot ship goods, software and technology to companies on the list without a license, which is likely to be denied.

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.

The 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 US 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 US, he added.

“The fact t