Chinese embassy in Washington, DC condemns designation, calling it ‘discriminatory’.

The United States has designated Chinese corporate giants Alibaba, BYD and Baidu as companies that support China’s military, expanding its blacklist to some of the country’s best-known commercial brands.

The Pentagon included the firms in an update on Monday that is likely to complicate the fragile detente underway between Washington and Beijing after years of rocky relations.

China’s embassy in Washington, DC, condemned the listing as “discriminatory” and an example of the US government “overstretching” the concept of national security.

“Chinese companies that do business overseas have been strictly observing laws and regulations of their host countries,” an embassy spokesperson said.

“The US should stop its wrong practice and create a fair, just and non-discriminatory environment for Chinese companies.”

Alibaba, BYD and Baidu did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

The Pentagon’s list of “Chinese military companies,” which is updated annually, now includes 188 firms, up from 134 in 2025.

Firms that are included on the list, which was created in 2021, are barred from consideration for US defence contracts.

The Pentagon defines “Chinese military companies” as entities that are owned or controlled by the Chinese military, or that contribute to China’s “military civil fusion”, referring to Beijing’s strategy of melding civilian and defence-related research and innovation.

Companies must also carry out some of their operations in the US to be designated.

The expansion of the blacklist comes less than a month after US President Donald Trump met Chinese leader Xi Jinping in Beijing for a two-day summit aimed at lowering the temperature in their countries’ years-long trade war and tech rivalry.

Alibaba, Baidu, and BYD are among China’s most prominent brands, claiming the top spots in the e-commerce, internet search and electric vehicles markets, respectively.

The addition of several household brands that are not normally associated with the defence sector mirrors last year’s designation of tech firm Tencent, the owner of the ubiquitous messaging app WeChat.

Other additions to the list include RoboSense Technology, an AI and robotics company headquartered in Shenzhen, and Hangzhou-based Unitree Robotics.

RoboSense Technology and Unitree Robotics did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Dennis Wilder, a national security expert who worked on China at the CIA and the White House’s National Security Council, expressed scepticism about the feasibility of implementing such a “broad brush” blacklist.

“Although it may make some US firms wary of engaging with the labeled entities, in fact many US firms already have deep relationships with these entities that they are not going to give up unless there are real penalties attached to working commercial deals with them,” Wilder told Al Jazeera.

“Sanctions that range this widely are sanctions that don’t work. Unless the US is willing to decouple from the Chinese economy all together, these sanctions are simply performative,” Wilder said.

Sanctions to be effective need to be targeted and need to be bought into by other key states long before the entities lists are announced.