Three Chinese tech giants are on a US military blacklist. All three can still buy America’s best AI, as long as they buy it in the right country.
Three of China’s biggest technology companies sit on a US military blacklist. All three can still reach some of America’s most advanced artificial intelligence. The trick is where they reach it.
OpenAI and Google have confirmed they supply advanced AI services to Singapore-registered subsidiaries of Alibaba, Baidu and Tencent, according to an investigation by the Financial Times. All three parent companies appear on the Pentagon’s “1260H” list, which names firms Washington accuses of ties to the Chinese military.
The sales are legal. That is exactly what has rattled Washington.
The Singapore side door #
US export controls rest on two things: named entities and named places. Mainland China is restricted. Singapore is not. A Chinese firm blacklisted in Washington can register a subsidiary in Singapore, and on paper that unit is a Singaporean business. It can sign contracts its parent in Hangzhou or Shenzhen cannot.
Current rules block direct access to a handful of frontier models, including OpenAI’s GPT-5.6 and Anthropic’s Mythos and Fable. They stop short of a blanket ban on Chinese-headquartered firms using cutting-edge AI software, even the ones on the 1260H list. The gap is wide enough to drive a cloud contract through.
It echoes the hardware fight. Trump officials have already warned that a loophole let Chinese firms buy Nvidia’s Blackwell chips. Nvidia’s Vera CPU has been cast as a side door back into China. Now the same pattern has reached the software layer.
What the companies say #
OpenAI said it blocks direct access to its models from mainland China. It lets some Chinese-owned companies use its services in places where it can enforce safeguards and watch for misuse. “We don’t think nationality alone should decide access,” the company told the FT.
It has not been entirely hands-off. Last month OpenAI suspended API access for Alibaba-linked users after spotting suspected “distillation”, where a developer uses a leading model’s outputs to train a rival system. OpenAI reported the activity to the US government.
Google said its AI tools are available in markets including Singapore and Hong Kong, under usage policies that forbid distillation. It also conceded the limit of geography. A border on a map does little to stop a determined user who wants to route around it.
Anthropic draws a harder line #
Anthropic has taken the strictest stance of the three. It bars Chinese companies, and foreign entities they own, from touching its frontier models. It has also pressed Washington for broader export controls on AI software. Last week it moved to close loopholes that Chinese users had exploited.
The firm recently watched US controls on its Fable model shift, a sign of how fast the policy line keeps moving. It has named names, too. Anthropic has accused the Chinese labs DeepSeek, Moonshot and MiniMax of distillation. It told Congress it believed Alibaba had created around 25,000 fake accounts to run more than 28.8 million interactions with its Claude model, in breach of its terms.
A blacklist under challenge #
Alibaba rejects the premise. It has asked a US court to strike it from the 1260H list, calling the Pentagon’s designation “arbitrary and capricious”. Baidu declined to comment. Tencent and Alibaba did not respond to the FT’s questions.
Critics of the current setup want the rules rewritten around capability, not corporate address. Chris McGuire, a former Biden administration official now at the Council on Foreign Relations, backs a tougher line.
Export controls, he argues, remain the sharpest tool to slow China’s AI progress. The most advanced models, he says, should stay out of Chinese firms’ hands wherever those firms log in.
Why it matters #
The stakes run past a single blacklist. If frontier models flow freely to listed firms through friendly jurisdictions, the export regime the US spent years building around chips starts to look porous on software. Washington has already argued over how tightly to ring-fence access, and Nvidia’s Jensen Huang has clashed with the Senate over China sales.
The Singapore route suggests the next front will not be about chips at all. It will be about who gets to run the models those chips were built to train.
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