The Pentagon has added Alibaba, Baidu, EV-maker BYD, and buzzy robotics company Unitree to a list of entities it says support the Chinese military.
The expansion of the list increases the chance that the Department of Defense could make it harder for U.S. companies to do business with these entities. It’s also likely to further strain the tension between the U.S. and Chinese governments.
“We categorically reject the inclusion of Baidu on the list, and there is no credible justification for adding Baidu to the list,” Baidu said in a statement to TechCrunch. “The suggestion that Baidu is a military company is entirely baseless. We will not hesitate to use all options available to us to have the company removed from the list.”
Alibaba told TechCrunch that it “is not a Chinese military company nor part of any military-civil fusion strategy. We will take all available legal action against attempts to misrepresent our company.”
The list — known as the 1260H list, for the specific section of the 2021 National Defense Authorization Act that created it — is just one tool that the U.S. has used to place restrictions on Chinese tech. President Donald Trump has used tariffs in both of his terms to put pressure on China, including a 100% tax on imported Chinese EVs.
This particular update to the 1260H list was briefly published in February, before being pulled from the Federal Register for unexplained reasons, as Bloomberg News notes.
Most of China’s biggest artificial intelligence players are now on the list, with Tencent added last year. This comes as Trump has said he’s weighing whether the U.S. should take equity stakes in the country’s top AI companies.
The updated list now includes 188 companies.
The Pentagon added a handful of automotive industry players to the list this year. In addition to BYD, trendy EV company Nio and battery companies CALB Group and EVE Energy were added. RoboSense, one of China’s leading makers of lidar sensors, has joined its rival Hesai on the list, too. Baidu is also one of China’s leaders in autonomous vehicles.
BYD, Nio, and RoboSense did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
This story has been updated with responses from Alibaba and Baidu.
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