According to a new report, AI company DeepSeek, along with over a hundred other Chinese companies, was slated for addition to the Department of Commerce’s Entity List last year after a senior U.S. State Department official said the firm supported Chinese military and intelligence operations. Chinese memory maker CXMT was also slated for the blacklist. However, the White House has held off updating its blacklist to avoid escalating trade tensions with Beijing, especially in the lead-up to President Donald Trump’s three-day state visit to China. Anthropic also claims that DeepSeek and two other frontier Chinese models distilled Claude, making 16 million exchanges with 24,000 fraudulent accounts. There have also been reports that the AI firm has been using shell companies to acquire banned Nvidia chips. Despite concerns, DeepSeek is gaining popularity among American users as an alternative to more expensive models from OpenAI and Anthropic, and CXMT is gaining traction with mainstream brands like Corsair for DRAM chips. The United States has been using bans and export controls to keep China in check, but the Chinese government controls rare-earth materials crucial for semiconductor manufacturing.