- DeepSeek was recommended to be added to the US entity list.
- The company was accused of aiding the Chinese military and intelligence.
- White House avoided blacklisting companies ahead of Trump’s visit to China
Despite Anthropic’s claims that Chinese artificial intelligence company DeepSeek distilled its Claude model to improve its own models, and more evidence that DeepSeek supported Chinese military and intelligence operations, the United States has refrained from adding the company to the Entity List.
Exclusive PakGazette The report, citing people familiar with the matter, claims that the White House has avoided adding DeepSeek and more than 100 Chinese companies to the blacklist to avoid further inflaming tensions between the two countries.
An interagency committee recommended the White House add the companies to the Entity List, but the administration avoided taking action before President Donald Trump’s visit to China, where he met with Xi Jinping.
DeepSeek bypasses US entity list
Anthropic’s distillation claims claim that DeepSeek used more than 16 million trades with 24,000 fraudulent accounts to distill the capabilities of the Claude model.
“Distillation may be legitimate: AI labs use it to create smaller, cheaper models for their clients. But foreign labs that illicitly distill American models can remove safeguards, feeding the model’s capabilities into their own military, intelligence and surveillance systems,” Anthropic said in a statement on X. The claims made by Anthropic also point to two other Chinese artificial intelligence companies: Moonshot and MiniMax.
Distillation may be legitimate: AI labs use it to create smaller, cheaper models for their clients. But foreign laboratories that illicitly distill American models can remove safeguards, feeding the model’s capabilities into their own military, intelligence and surveillance systems.February 23, 2026
Many American companies have turned to using DeepSeek as a cheaper alternative to frontier American models, such as OpenAI’s GPT-5.5, which incurs a much higher cost to use compared to models produced in China.
If the White House were to add DeepSeek to the Entity List, it would likely face a backlash from American companies seeking to take advantage of cheaper alternatives from competing Chinese brands.
The United States has taken some steps to limit Chinese influence over American technology, including banning all Chinese laboratories from examining devices destined for the United States and sanctioning several major Chinese companies, such as Huawei.
The White House is undergoing a delicate balancing act. The current global semiconductor shortage, exacerbated by demand for AI, is further exacerbated by Chinese control over rare earth minerals essential for the production of components essential for technology manufacturing. If the United States were to add a number of Chinese companies to the entity list, China could retaliate by further restricting access to exports of these materials.
Through Toms Hardware
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