DeepSeek reportedly won’t be banned in U.S. (for now)

DeepSeek isn’t being banned in the U.S. — at least, for now.

Reuters reports that the Trump administration is holding off on adding the Chinese AI company to the U.S. Department of Commerce’s Entity List, allowing it to continue doing business in the country for the time being.

The Entity List is a list of foreign entities upon which the U.S. government has imposed trade restrictions, citing national security concerns. Being added to this list essentially means the end of your ability to do business in the country. The Trump administration previously added Chinese tech giant Huawei to the Entity List in 2019, blocking the company’s U.S. operations. 

That list was poised to get much longer, with DeepSeek reportedly just one of over 100 companies approved for addition to the Entity List last year. However, sources told Reuters that the U.S. government is postponing this to avoid further aggravating its increasingly tense relationship with China. As such, it isn’t clear if or when DeepSeek will be added to the Entity List.

DeepSeek reportedly raised over 50 ​billion yuan ($7.4 billion) in its first funding round earlier this week, and is now valued at over $50 billion. In comparison, U.S. rivals such as Anthropic and OpenAI have been valued at $965 billion and $852 billion respectively. Unlike them, DeepSeek makes its frontier AI model available as open-source, allowing anyone to download, use, and modify it for free under an MIT license. 

New York previously banned DeepSeek from government devices last February, also citing national security concerns, while Texas did the same the month prior.

The U.S. government has expressed increasing concern about foreign technology in recent years, accusing private companies such as TikTok and DJI of being controlled by the Chinese government. In March, the U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC) banned all new foreign-made routers from entering the country —  impacting essentially all all routers. In addition to outright bans, the U.S. government has also imposed high tariffs on Chinese goods such as electric cars, keeping them out of the country.

In a similar vein, the U.S. government has also imposed restrictions on exporting American technology to China, with NVIDIA going from dominating 95 percent of China’s advanced chip market to having zero market share. Though NVIDIA has been approved to sell throttled chips made exclusively for China, the Chinese government has reportedly placed its own restrictions on their import.