The Trump administration has held off adding more than 100 firms — including the Chinese AI startup DeepSeek and memory chipmaker CXMT — to the Commerce Department's Entity List, even after deeming them security risks, in a move reportedly aimed at avoiding an escalation of tensions with Beijing.
US–China Tech Friction · Commerce Dept.
US Holds Off Blacklisting DeepSeek and 100+ Chinese Firms
More than 100 companies — including AI startup DeepSeek and memory chipmaker CXMT — were cleared for the Entity List last year, but the action sits unpublished as Washington avoids escalating tensions with Beijing.
100+
Chinese firms cleared for the list, still on hold
Oct 2025
Last addition — longest gap in over a decade
$50B+
DeepSeek valuation after $740M June 2026 round
A Model Leap: Context Length
From 128K to 1,000K tokens — DeepSeek-V4 handles up to ~8× longer documents than V3.
128K
DeepSeek-V3
1M
DeepSeek-V4 Pro
SWE-bench Verified
80–91%
V4 Pro on software-engineering tasks
HumanEval
90s%
Rivaling GPT-5 & Claude Opus systems
Security Concerns Flagged
Suspected ties to the PLA and intelligence services
Alleged chip-control circumvention via SE Asia shell firms
Anthropic & OpenAI cite improper extraction / distillation
CXMT previously named a Chinese military company
Momentum Despite It
Open weights released on Hugging Face, plus API & chat
Praised for cost-performance, reasoning and coding
$740M round at a $50B+ valuation in June 2026
Founder control preserved via unusual deal structure
The unresolved question: security vs. trade.
Critics say holding the list keeps trade policy ahead of national-security tools. As DeepSeek rises on both technical and capital fronts, how Washington sets that priority will shape the next phase of US–China tech friction.
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