Why Trump Is Holding Back on Blacklisting China's DeepSeek AI and CXMT

The United States has postponed placing Chinese artificial intelligence startup DeepSeek, memory chip producer CXMT, and more than 100 other companies deemed a national security risk onto a trade blacklist, according to two sources familiar with the matter. The delay comes as President Donald Trump’s administration seeks to avoid heightening tensions with Beijing.

DeepSeek, CXMT, and a number of other firms were actually approved last year by a US government interagency committee for inclusion on the Department of Commerce’s Entity List. This fact is being disclosed publicly for the first time. Reuters also exclusively reported the large number of companies still awaiting announcement of their addition to the list.

DeepSeek, whose low-cost AI model shook the tech world in January 2025, has been accused of supporting Chinese military and intelligence operations. This year, AI company Anthropic claimed to have discovered a campaign by DeepSeek and two other Chinese AI labs to illicitly extract capabilities from the Claude AI platform to enhance their own models. Meanwhile, OpenAI warned US lawmakers that DeepSeek was also attempting to access and exploit its AI models.

ChangXin Memory Technologies (CXMT), China’s largest memory chip manufacturer, was designated a Chinese military company by the US Department of Defense during President Joe Biden’s administration. The Commerce Department has also been considering adding CXMT to the Entity List for more than a year, as reported by Reuters and other media outlets.

American companies cannot ship goods, software, or technology to entities on the list without obtaining a special licence, and such licences are almost invariably denied. DeepSeek and CXMT could not be reached for comment outside normal working hours. The Commerce Department’s Bureau of Industry and Security (BIS), which oversees the Entity List, also did not directly answer questions regarding the lack of updates to the list since last year or matters concerning DeepSeek and CXMT.

In a statement, BIS said it uses a variety of policy and enforcement instruments, including the Entity List, on a daily basis to combat actors deemed detrimental to US interests. The United States and China are currently locked in fierce competition spanning technology, trade, and national security. Washington employs tariffs and export controls to constrain Beijing’s progress, while China maintains tight control over supplies of rare earth metals critical to the global defence, automotive, and semiconductor industries.