According to a Financial Times report, Alphabet-owned Google and OpenAI have been selling advanced AI technology to Chinese tech giants Alibaba, Tencent, and Baidu, which are blacklisted by the Pentagon, via their "Singapore-based subsidiaries." A Google representative told The National that the company is committed to complying with all applicable export control and trade laws and has "strong terms of use and protections," including disabling accounts and blocking access to AI services. Another Google representative stated that the company does not operate any cloud computing regions or data centres in mainland China, though its AI services are available in Hong Kong and Singapore. The representative added that "restricting sales to certain geographies" does not lessen the likelihood of distillation, a process of stealing US proprietary information, which Google routinely tracks and shares with other companies. Mark MacCarthy, a senior fellow at Georgetown University, noted a movement in Congress to close the loophole by extending export controls to remote data centers and described efforts to prevent Chinese AI models like DeepSeek from being used in the US as "protectionist measures."