*The decision had, in effect, already been made. According to people familiar with the matter, reports Reuters, a US interagency committee approved adding the Chinese AI startup DeepSeek, the memory-chip maker CXMT and more than 100 other companies flagged as national-security risks to the Commerce Department’s Entity List last year. *
What has not happened, and is being reported for the first time, is the next step: the Trump administration has held off on actually listing them, wary of escalating tensions with Beijing.
The Entity List is the workhorse of American export control, and being placed on it functions as a soft blacklist, requiring US suppliers to obtain hard-to-get licences before selling to a named firm. An interagency sign-off normally precedes the listing rather than replacing it. That a panel cleared more than 100 companies and the listings then stalled is the story: the bureaucracy reached its conclusion and the politics declined to ratify it.
The case against DeepSeek, as US officials have framed it, is not subtle. A senior State Department official told Reuters last year that the company had supported China’s military and intelligence operations and had tried to use Southeast Asian shell companies to obtain advanced US chips illegally.
DeepSeek burst into Western view in January 2025, when a low-cost model upended assumptions about how much compute a frontier system required, and it has been a fixture of the China-AI security debate since.
The security concerns extend to the conduct of the model labs themselves. Anthropic has said it identified a campaign by DeepSeek and two other Chinese labs to extract capabilities from its Claude platform to improve their own systems, and OpenAI has warned lawmakers that DeepSeek was targeting its models too.
Those allegations, of distillation and illicit access rather than legitimate competition, are part of what the interagency panel weighed.
Set against that is the diplomacy. The administration is trying to keep relations with Beijing from deteriorating, and a blacklist sweeping up more than 100 firms at once would be read in China as a major escalation.
The hold reflects the familiar tension in US-China tech policy, between the security agencies that want to act and the trade negotiators who want room to deal, a tension TNW has tracked through successive rounds of chip export controls.
CXMT, the other named firm, sharpens the dilemma. As one of China’s most advanced memory-chip makers, it sits close to the centre of Beijing’s drive for semiconductor self-sufficiency, and adding it to the Entity List would be among the more consequential single listings available to Washington.
That is precisely why it is sensitive: the firms the security agencies most want to constrain are the ones whose listing Beijing would treat as most provocative. The hold, in other words, is heaviest exactly where the case for acting is strongest.
For now, the listings sit in limbo: approved on the merits, withheld on the timing. The companies remain off the formal blacklist not because the case against them failed but because the moment to act has not, in the administration’s judgement, arrived. When and whether it does will say more about the state of US-China relations than about DeepSeek.
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