The United States Department of Defense (also known as the Pentagon) has re-included Alibaba, Baidu, and Byd in a list of companies considered close to the Chinese armed forces and therefore risky for American national security. The decision does not entail immediate legal consequences but serves as a warning to investors: Washington, that is, could in the future adopt more punitive measures against these companies.
THE FEBRUARY REVERSAL AND THE TRUMP-XI MEETING
The timing of the inclusion of Alibaba, Baidu, and Byd in the so-called 1260H List is significant because it came almost a month after the meeting in Beijing between Presidents Donald Trump and Xi Jinping, which ended with the hope of establishing a “constructive relationship of strategic stability” between the two nations. Xi, moreover, is expected to visit the United States in September.
The Pentagon had already included Alibaba, Baidu, Byd, and other Chinese companies in the 1260H List last February, only to withdraw the decision later, probably to avoid creating a new point of friction between Washington and Beijing ahead of Trump’s visit.
WHAT DO ALIBABA, BAIDU, AND BYD HAVE TO DO WITH THE CHINESE ARMED FORCES?
Alibaba, Baidu, and Byd are highly significant companies: Alibaba is a technology group active in e-commerce but also in cloud computing, Baidu has developed the most popular search engine in China, while Byd is the largest electric vehicle manufacturer in the world.
The Pentagon believes that Alibaba provides technological support to Chinese military operations against American targets. It also thinks that the company, by virtue of its link with the Ministry of Industry, contributes to the “fusion between the military and civilian sectors in favor of the Chinese defense industrial base” and shares its technologies with Beijing’s armed forces.
The automaker Byd, similarly, is said to be affiliated with the Chinese Ministry of Industry and to have direct ties with Sasac, the government commission that manages state-owned companies.
With the inclusion of Alibaba and Baidu in the list, the U.S. Department of Defense has “targeted” all three Chinese champions of artificial intelligence. Tencent, present on the list since 2025, is moreover working on implementing an artificial intelligence agent within WeChat, the “super-app” widely used in China.
OTHER CHINESE COMPANIES ON THE PENTAGON’S LIST
The Pentagon’s 1260H List also includes two producers of highly sought-after memory chips, Yangtze and ChangXin; the biotechnology company WuXi AppTec, which in the past collaborated with Eli Lilly on the anti-obesity drug Zepbound; the robotics company Unitree; Tp-Link Technologies, which produces the very popular routers.
