The US government has spent the better part of three years building a fortress around its most advanced AI technology. Turns out, the fortress has a very obvious side door in Singapore.
OpenAI and Google have been providing access to their AI models to subsidiaries of Alibaba, Baidu, and Tencent, three Chinese tech giants that sit on the Pentagon’s 1260H blacklist of companies with suspected ties to China’s military. The arrangement works because current US export controls focus almost entirely on hardware, specifically advanced semiconductors, while largely ignoring the software layer.
The Singapore workaround
Here’s how it works. Chinese tech companies operate subsidiaries in places like Singapore and Hong Kong. Those subsidiaries, technically domiciled in jurisdictions outside mainland China, can access US AI services without tripping the same regulatory wires that block direct sales to Beijing-linked entities.
Google acknowledged that its services in markets like Singapore and Hong Kong are subject to specific usage policies.
