The Biden administration added 14 additional Chinese companies to the trade blacklist

Days after pushing to sweep Restriction on the export of AI chipsthe Biden administration added 14 additional Chinese companies to its restricted business list. This brings the full list up to 25 names, according to the report from The Associate Press.

Sophgo is, perhaps, the most high-profile addition. An entity of Bitmain, the firm made international headlines when it was identified as an intermediary between Chinese hardware giant Huawei and Taiwanese chipmaker TSMC.

Suspicions arose in December after a chip found on the Huawei Ascend 910B AI processor was linked to a Sophgo purchase made by TSMC. At the time, the Biden administration announced plans to blacklist the company, a promise it has now made good on.

The move comes amid a flurry of activity during the waning days of the Biden administration. The response to Monday’s “Interim Final Rule on the Diffusion of Artificial Intelligence” drew a swift and strong response from the industry. American silicon AI giant Nvidia called the action “misguided”.

The statement praised the Trump administration’s early handling of AI, while refusing to pull any punches against the outgoing administration.

In its final days in office, the Biden Administration is seeking to undermine America’s leadership with a regulatory moratorium of more than 200 pages, drafted in secret and without proper legislative review. This broad overreach imposes bureaucratic control over how major American semiconductors, computers, systems and even software are designed and marketed around the world. And in an attempt to stifle market outcomes and stifle competition — the lifeblood of innovation — the Biden Administration’s new rule threatens to erode America’s hard-earned technological advantage.

Of course, Huawei’s blacklist that blocked the company from using American-founded technologies including Google’s Android and Qualcomm chips, came during the first Trump administration. How, precisely, this plays out is not clear, since the incoming administration seems to continue a tough stance on China, while it seems to favor American innovation in the middle of the AI ​​race.