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The US has put dozens of Chinese entities on an export blacklist in the first big effort by the Trump administration to slow China’s ability to develop advanced artificial intelligence chips, hypersonic weapons and military-related technology.
The US Department of Commerce on Tuesday added more than 70 Chinese groups to the “entity list”, which requires any American company selling technology to them to have a licence. In most cases the licence request will be denied.
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.
The US said the subsidiaries were targeted for helping to develop supercomputers for military use and obtaining American-made technology to support projects for China and the People’s Liberation Army. It added they had developed large AI models and advanced chips for military use.
“We will not allow adversaries to exploit American technology to bolster their own militaries and threaten American lives,” said Howard Lutnick, the US commerce secretary.
“We are committed to using every tool at the department’s disposal to ensure our most advanced technologies stay out of the hands of those who seek to harm Americans.”
The US has not provided any public evidence to support the blacklisting of Beijing Academy of Artificial Intelligence for supporting China’s military modernisation. BAAI is a leading non-profit AI research institute set up in 2018 to bring together industry and academia. It regularly releases open source AI models and other tools and holds an annual conference to convene global experts in the field.
The blacklisting of BAAI comes after Washington targeted Zhipu in January. The start-up is a frontrunner among Chinese AI groups developing large language models. BAAI did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
In most cases, the restrictions will apply to non-US companies that export products containing American technology to the Chinese groups, under an extraterritorial tool known as the “foreign direct product rule”.
The US also targeted four groups — Henan Dingxin Information Industry, Nettrix Information Industry, Suma Technology and Suma-USI Electronics — who are involved in developing exascale superconductors for military purposes, such as nuclear weapons modelling.
Washington said they provided “significant manufacturing capabilities” to Sugon, an advanced computer server-maker put on the entity list in 2019 for building supercomputers for military use.
The Biden administration imposed sweeping export controls on China encompassing everything from quantum computing to AI chips under its “small yard, high fence” policy. But critics accused it of failing to close loopholes that let some Chinese companies avoid restrictions.
“These are long overdue actions plugging holes in existing regulations that were stymied for years by industry lobbyists,” said one analyst focused on technology-related geopolitical issues.
Jeffrey Kessler, under-secretary of commerce for industry and security, said his bureau was “sending a clear, resounding message” that the administration would prevent US technology “from being misused for high performance computing, hypersonic missiles, military aircraft training and [Unmanned Aerial Vehicles] that threaten our national security”.
The US also added 10 entities based in China, South Africa and the UAE to the list over links to the Test Flying Academy of South Africa, a flight school that Washington put on the entity list in 2023 after discovering it was hiring western fighter jet pilots, including from the UK, to train Chinese pilots.
The Chinese embassy in Washington did not respond to a request for comment
Additional reporting by Ryan McMorrow in Beijing
