U.S. holds off blacklisting China's DeepSeek, more than 100 firms deemed security risks

HONG KONG, CHINA - 2025/03/01: In this photo illustration, Artificial intelligence (AI) apps of perplexity, DeepSeek and ChatGPT are seen on a smartphone screen. Sopa Images | Lightrocket | Getty Images The U.S. has held off adding China's AI startup DeepSeek, memory chipmaker CXMT and more than 100 other companies flagged as national security risks to a trade blacklist, according to two people familiar with the matter, as the Trump administration tries to avoid escalating tensions with Beijing. DeepSeek, CXMT and other companies were approved by an interagency committee last year for addition to the Commerce Department's Entity List, which is being reported for the first time. Reuters is also exclusively reporting the large number of companies awaiting publication on the list. DeepSeek, whose low-cost AI model sent shockwaves through the technology world in January 2025, has supported China's military and intelligence operations, a senior U.S. State Department official told Reuters last year, adding that the startup tried to use Southeast Asian shell companies to illegally access advanced U.S. chips. This year, Anthropic said it identified a campaign by DeepSeek and two other Chinese AI labs to illicitly extract capabilities from its Claude AI platform to improve their own models, and OpenAI warned lawmakers that DeepSeek also was targeting its models. …