The U.S. Commerce Department has added over 70 Chinese entities to its export blacklist, marking a significant step in the Trump administration’s efforts to curb China’s access to advanced technologies crucial for AI, hypersonic weapons, and military development. The U.S. aims to prevent adversaries from exploiting American technology for military purposes, as reported by Demetri Sevastopulo of the Financial Times.
The US has put dozens of Chinese entities on an export blacklist in the Trump administration’s first big effort to slow China’s ability to develop advanced artificial intelligence chips, hypersonic weapons and military-related technology. […]
Among the listed groups are six Chinese subsidiaries of Inspur, a big cloud computing group that has worked with US chipmaker Intel, including one based in Taiwan. The Biden administration put Inspur on the entity list in 2023 but came under criticism for not adding its subsidiaries. Inspur did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
In addition to these efforts, the U.S. has blacklisted the Beijing Academy of Artificial Intelligence (BAAI) over concerns about its support for China’s military modernization, despite no public evidence being provided for the action. BAAI, a prominent AI research institute founded in 2018, works to bridge the gap between industry and academia by releasing open-source AI models and tools. This blacklisting follows a similar action against Chinese AI startup Zhipu in January, and the restrictions are set to affect non-U.S. companies exporting American technology to these entities under the “foreign direct product rule.”
The US also targeted four groups — Henan Dingxin Information Industry, Nettrix Information Industry, Suma Technology and Suma-USI Electronics — that are involved in developing exascale superconductors for military purposes, such as nuclear weapons modelling.
By blacklisting dozens of Chinese companies, including Inspur subsidiaries that purchase chips from major U.S. firms like Nvidia, Intel, and AMD, the Trump administration is signaling an even tougher stance than the Biden administration’s approach, reports Liza Lin of The Wall Street Journal. While these companies will now require government approval to access American technology, Silicon Valley companies, including Nvidia, have expressed concerns that the existing restrictions are already too severe.
