DeepSeek isn't being banned in the U.S. — at least, for now. Reuters reports that the Trump administration is holding off on adding the Chinese AI company to the U.S. Department of Commerce's Entity List, allowing it to continue doing business in the country for the time being.
The Entity List is a list of foreign entities upon which the U.S. government has imposed trade restrictions, citing national security concerns. Being added to this list essentially means the end of your ability to do business in the country. The Trump administration previously added Chinese tech giant Huawei to the Entity List in 2019, blocking the company's U.S. operations. That list was poised to get much longer, with DeepSeek reportedly just one of over 100 companies approved for addition to the Entity List last year. However, sources told Reuters that the U.S. government is postponing this to avoid further aggravating its increasingly tense relationship with China. As such, it isn't clear if or when DeepSeek will be added to the Entity List.
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DeepSeek reportedly raised over 50 billion yuan ($7.4 billion) in its first funding round earlier this week, and is now valued at over $50 billion. In comparison, U.S. rivals such as Anthropic and OpenAI have been valued at $965 billion and $852 billion respectively. Unlike them, DeepSeek makes its frontier AI model available as open-source, allowing anyone to download, use, and modify it for free under an MIT license.
