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Washington has blacklisted Zhipu, China's best-known startup that develops large language models for artificial intelligence, because the Biden administration seeks to cement its tradition of cracking down on Chinese technology.
The Beijing-based company was named amongst China's top LLM startups on Wednesday when it was added to the Enterprise List, a compilation of corporations deemed national security risks and subject to trade restrictions.
Washington claimed Zhipu was advancing China's military capabilities by integrating AI research, however the startup said it “strongly disagrees” with the US move, which it said had “no factual basis.”
Zhipu, founded by Tsinghua computer science professor Tang Jie, has developed LLMs just like those supporting OpenAI's ChatGPT. The company has worked with local authorities to supply services including chatbots for residents to ask administrative questions on trash collection and parking hours.
The startup has also worked with Chinese and foreign corporations with offices in China to leverage their LLMs for products comparable to customized AI assistants.
Zhipu and a number of other related corporations were added to the U.S. list, effectively banning them from purchasing most American technology.
“These rules will further goal and strengthen our controls to be certain that (China) and others who seek to avoid our laws and undermine U.S. national security fail of their efforts,” said Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo.
A Zhipu investor said the move “shouldn’t have any impact on Zhipu's existing operations, and most of its core technology is in-house with little overseas operations.” The investor added that Washington's singling out of Zhipu could, conversely, “strengthen its positioning inside China” as the federal government would have a stronger incentive to support its growth.
Chinese state groups have stepped in to fund corporations under US sanctions, including AI start-up SenseTime and national champion Huawei.
Zhipu is already backed by the state-owned National Social Security Fund, Tencent, Alibaba Cloud, enterprise capital groups HongShan and Hillhouse, and Saudi Arabian fund P7. The company received $400 million in a financing round in December.
While many Chinese LLM startups need to expand overseas, the investor said Zhipu can consolidate its lead by focusing exclusively on the domestic market.
Washington's latest move also expanded the range of advanced chips that require licenses to ship to China and imposed export controls on some scientific tools utilized by drug developers, comparable to: B. Spectral flow cytometers and a few liquid chromatography mass spectrometers.
Chinese corporations are already banned from buying Nvidia's highest-end AI chips, that are crucial for training and deploying models, and the U.S. this week imposed latest geographic restrictions on the processors in an try and curb Nvidia's black market flow chips to China.
Also added to the corporate list on Wednesday was Chinese chip designer Sophgo, which got here under scrutiny last 12 months for possibly supplying Huawei with processors from Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing, thus evading US sanctions.
Washington claimed the corporate “acted on the behest of Beijing to advance (China's) goals of domestic advanced chip production.”
