The decision had, in effect, already been made. According to people familiar with the matter, reports Reuters, a US interagency committee approved adding the Chinese AI startup DeepSeek, the memory-chip maker CXMT and more than 100 other companies flagged as national-security risks to the Commerce Department’s Entity List last year.
What has not happened, and is being reported for the first time, is the next step: the Trump administration has held off on actually listing them, wary of escalating tensions with Beijing.
The Entity List is the workhorse of American export control, and being placed on it functions as a soft blacklist, requiring US suppliers to obtain hard-to-get licences before selling to a named firm. An interagency sign-off normally precedes the listing rather than replacing it. That a panel cleared more than 100 companies and the listings then stalled is the story: the bureaucracy reached its conclusion and the politics declined to ratify it.
The case against DeepSeek, as US officials have framed it, is not subtle. A senior State Department official told Reuters last year that the company had supported China’s military and intelligence operations and had tried to use Southeast Asian shell companies to obtain advanced US chips illegally.
