Pentagon adds Alibaba, Baidu, BYD to list of Chinese military-linked companies

The Pentagon on Monday updated its annual list of Chinese companies the U.S. identifies as aiding Beijing’s military, adding roughly two dozen new businesses including e-commerce and cloud giant Alibaba, search and AI firm Baidu, and electric vehicle maker BYD, according to the Wall Street Journal.

The designation bars companies on the list from doing business with the U.S. military. The Defense Department revises the list annually, and this year’s expansion reflects the view from U.S. national-security officials that China leverages its private sector to build and improve military technology, the Journal reported.

New additions this year include a range of Chinese consumer and tech companies, the Journal reported: Alibaba, a conglomerate with e-commerce, cloud computing and other businesses in the U.S.; Baidu, a Chinese internet search and artificial intelligence company; electric carmaker BYD; pharmaceutical firm WuXi AppTec; and humanoid robotics company Unitree. The list also added China-founded router company TP-Link Technologies, following a recent federal prohibition on all new sales of foreign-made routers over administration concerns they could pose supply chain and cybersecurity risks.

“This demonstrates the administration sees real national security risks associated with Chinese products in sectors beyond semiconductors and AI,” Chris McGuire, a former State Department and National Security Council official who now specializes in China matters at the Council on Foreign Relations, told the Journal.

A spokesperson for the Chinese embassy in Washington told the Journal the Pentagon was “overstretching the concept of national security and making discriminatory lists to go after Chinese companies.”

The list’s release comes at a notable moment for the Trump administration and its ties to Beijing. Since the fall, the administration has curbed plans to impose penalties on certain Chinese companies, levy hefty tariffs and investigate China-linked hackers, the Journal reported. This year’s initial list was released in February but was immediately rescinded ahead of President Trump’s meeting last month with Xi Jinping, his Chinese counterpart, in Beijing.

“Inside the Pentagon, China continues to be considered a top military adversary,” the Journal reported. “The summit lowered the temperature on trade, but it didn’t change Washington’s core assessment that China’s commercial technology champions remain integral to Beijing’s military modernization,” Craig Singleton, senior China fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, told the Journal.

A Defense Department spokesperson told the Journal the Pentagon took the February list down to review it for updates and published a new list after making changes. In the intervening months, the department added back to the list chip companies Yangtze Memory Technologies and ChangXin Memory Technologies, which in the February version had been removed.

Companies on the list are barred from doing business with the U.S. military. Sometimes the reputational damage can affect sales to other parts of the government or to American consumers, the Journal reported. However, in cases like SZ DJI Technology’s drones, which were added to the list in 2022 but remained popular with American consumers, the designation does little to impede the company’s U.S. sales.

The Defense Department has faced legal challenges for the process it uses to designate Chinese companies as military entities, the Journal reported. In one instance, the department briefly removed Hesai, which makes sensor technology used in American self-driving cars, after the company sued the administration. Hesai, which previously said the designation caused “serious reputational injury, a significant drop in stock price, and lost business opportunities,” has returned to this year’s list.

This year’s list also removes about 10 businesses that were on prior lists that the Pentagon said no longer qualified as Chinese military entities, the Journal reported.

U.S.-based TP-Link Systems, which is seeking an exemption to the ban on foreign-made routers, said in a statement to the Journal that “TP-Link Systems is not the subject of this designation or its associated restrictions.”

Alibaba, Baidu, BYD, WuXi AppTec, Unitree, Hesai, and the Chinese chip companies added to the list did not respond to a request for comment from the Journal.