By Ana Swanson

Copyright nytimes

Recent administrations have greatly expanded the use of the U.S. entity list.

Emily Kilcrease, a senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security, a Washington think tank, said additions from China and Russia had driven the increase in entity listings over the past six years, as the United States toughened its technology restrictions on China and sanctioned Russia after the invasion of Ukraine. A total of 1,661 entities has been added to the list since 2022, according to the think tank’s tracking.

But some targets of the entity list have easily sidestepped the impact of U.S. sanctions by shifting business to their subsidiaries instead.

One of those, Inspur Group, a Chinese tech firm that was added to the entity list in 2023 for developing supercomputers for the Chinese military.

U.S. companies briefly paused doing business with the firm after the Biden administration put Inspur’s parent company on the entity list. But they soon resumed doing business with Inspur’s subsidiaries. In March, the Trump administration added more subsidiaries of Inspur to the entity list.

Critics have said that companies could easily avoid the Trump administration’s latest rule change. If a subsidiary’s ownership is changed so that the parent company owns less than 50 percent of its shares, the entity listing will not apply to it.