The Pentagon has added Alibaba, Baidu, EV-maker BYD, and buzzy robotics company Unitree to a list of entities it says support the Chinese military.

The expansion of the list increases the chance that the Department of Defense could make it harder for U.S. companies to do business with these entities. It’s also likely to further strain the tension between the U.S. and Chinese governments.

“We categorically reject the inclusion of Baidu on the list, and there is no credible justification for adding Baidu to the list,” Baidu said in a statement to TechCrunch. “The suggestion that Baidu is a military company is entirely baseless. We will not hesitate to use all options available to us to have the company removed from the list.”

Alibaba told TechCrunch that it “is not a Chinese military company nor part of any military-civil fusion strategy. We will take all available legal action against attempts to misrepresent our company.”

The list — known as the 1260H list, for the specific section of the 2021 National Defense Authorization Act that created it — is just one tool that the U.S. has used to place restrictions on Chinese tech. President Donald Trump has used tariffs in both of his terms to put pressure on China, including a 100% tax on imported Chinese EVs.

This particular update to the 1260H list was briefly published in February, before being pulled from the Federal Register for unexplained reasons, as Bloomberg News notes.

Most of China’s biggest artificial intelligence players are now on the list, with Tencent added last year. This comes as Trump has said he’s weighing whether the U.S. should take equity stakes in the country’s top AI companies.

The updated list now includes 188 companies.

The Pentagon added a handful of automotive industry players to the list this year. In addition to BYD, trendy EV company Nio and battery companies CALB Group and EVE Energy were added. RoboSense, one of China’s leading makers of lidar sensors, has joined its rival Hesai on the list, too. Baidu is also one of China’s leaders in autonomous vehicles.

BYD, Nio, and RoboSense did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

This story has been updated with responses from Alibaba and Baidu.

ChatGPT-maker OpenAI has filed confidentially for an initial public offering, the company announced Monday in a blog post. The filing comes a little more than a week after its main rival, Anthropic, also filed to go public, ramping up the race between the two AI firms.

OpenAI, which was last valued at $852 billion post-money, submitted a draft registration statement to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission for a proposed IPO. OpenAI hasn’t shared any specifics yet. However, the company said it posted the blog because it expected a leak.

“We have not decided on timing yet; it may be a while because there are things we want to do that are likely easier as a private company,” the company wrote. “But it’s a complicated set of tradeoffs and this gives us the option to go public sooner if that ends up being best.”

Around the same time, and in a separate blog post, OpenAI published a sweeping philosophical statement about its mission, its vision for AGI, and its belief that AI should benefit all of humanity — the kind of forward-looking communication that companies entering a quiet period have historically been careful to avoid. That OpenAI appears comfortable publishing it so close to a confidential filing says something — not necessarily about its own legal judgment but about the regulatory environment it’s operating in. The SEC under the Trump administration has taken a markedly more hands-off posture toward tech and AI companies than it did under previous administrations, and OpenAI may simply be reading the room.

Whatever the regulatory questions, the filing is the latest signal that 2026 will be a blockbuster year for the public markets. SpaceX is also expected to make its debut at a $1.75 trillion valuation, meaning three of the most closely watched companies in tech could all go public within months of each other — a concentration of high-stakes offerings the markets haven’t seen since the dot-com boom.

OpenAI is racing to IPO even as it recently missed its own targets for new users and revenue, per The Wall Street Journal. Its chief financial officer, Sarah Friar, has reportedly raised concerns that OpenAI may not be able to support its massive data center spending. And the burn does appear to be massive. 

In late March, OpenAI secured $122 billion in the largest funding round in Silicon Valley history — $3 billion of which came directly from retail investors via bank channels. But the firm expects to spend roughly that same amount on computing power for AI research alone in 2028, and projects burning $85 billion that year even after doubling sales from the year prior, per The Wall Street Journal. Put another way, OpenAI is asking public market investors to buy into a business that, by its own projections, won’t generate more cash than it spends for at least four more years.

SpaceX offers a parallel data point. Its AI spending, while not as massive, illustrates how the cost to train large language models can exceed the revenue those models generate — a structural challenge the entire industry is grappling with, and one that public market investors will have to price.

Anthropic, on the other hand, has provided investors a much rosier picture of its financials, saying that it is close to achieving its first quarterly profit. Even so, with a recent $65 billion funding round and another $36 billion in chip-allocated debt potentially on its way, Anthropic’s burn rate isn’t exactly modest. 

The confidential IPO filing allows OpenAI to start its preparation for a public offering without publicly disclosing detailed financial information or business risks, which is why the company hasn’t shared stock pricing or how much it hopes to raise yet. That said, the secondary markets provide a glimpse into what investors are willing to pay. 

Anthropic recently surged to a $1 trillion valuation on Forge Global, a retail secondary market platform, surpassing OpenAI, which was recorded at around $880 billion in April. 

David Shapiro is founder and CEO of OpenVC and overseer of the NYSE OpenVC 500 Index, which tracks the largest public and private companies in the U.S. He said Anthropic’s rate of appreciation far exceeds OpenAI this year — 123% year-to-date versus OpenAI’s 11.3%. That said, despite Anthropic’s clear boost, OpenAI isn’t seeing a lack of secondary interest. 

“From a secondary investor standpoint, OpenAI had already grown into a significant portion of its valuation,” Shapiro told TechCrunch. “We haven’t seen OpenAI crater or anything close, and the valuation is still enormously successful, according to the index.”

He added that OpenAI’s stock in the secondary market “experienced a slight pop over the last few days, indicating investors may be pricing both as the ‘dual winners’ of the broader LLM race.”

But the race to get to the public markets first is a real concern. Experts say whoever makes their debut first will likely nab more of what is becoming increasingly scarce capital for AI companies — much of which may have already been absorbed by SpaceX, which is expected to IPO first among the three.

Additionally, Anthropic’s filing disclosures will set a valuation comp that constrains how OpenAI can price its own offering when it files, according to a recent PitchBook report that characterized OpenAI as overvalued relative to its fundamentals. In other words, if Anthropic prices conservatively, OpenAI’s path to its target valuation gets harder.

OpenAI was founded in 2015 as a nonprofit research lab and disrupted the world of AI when it released ChatGPT in 2022, sparking a wave of large language model advancements across the industry.

While OpenAI has expanded its products to accommodate enterprise and government customers, the firm has a strong reputation of being more consumer-focused than rival Anthropic. The company has built real scale, with around 900 million weekly active users.

The IPO comes after significant internal struggles within the company. In 2022, OpenAI’s board ousted Sam Altman over what it described as a lack of transparency and concerns about whether he was committed to the firm’s mission of benefiting all humanity. Altman was quickly reinstated, and the board members who were involved in the coup, including co-founder Ilya Sutskever, departed shortly after. The episode raised governance questions that have never been fully resolved and that prospective public investors will likely scrutinize closely.

More recently, OpenAI has faced several lawsuits, including a recent one from the state of Florida accusing the company and Altman of harming children by providing information to school shooters, offering guidance on self-harm, and fostering addiction among young users. Florida’s complaint adds to the litany of lawsuits against OpenAI and other chatbot makers following user delusions, self-harm, suicide, and mass casualty events.

Last month, OpenAI prevailed at trial after co-founder and rival Elon Musk sued the company and Altman over an alleged promise to keep the company a nonprofit. The case was ultimately tossed out after both a jury and judge found Musk had waited too long — he was beyond the statute of limitations when he filed the case in 2024. 

OpenAI has also faced criticism after its president, Greg Brockman, and his wife each donated $12.5 million to Leading the Future, a pro-AI political action committee dedicated to thwarting local politicians who advocate for AI regulation. Both also made similar contributions to MAGA Inc., the pro-Trump super PAC. OpenAI has tried to distance itself from what it calls Brockman’s personal donations, saying the funds were not provided on behalf of the company.

The vibe of Apple’s 2026 Worldwide Developers Conference felt like a spouse proudly listing all the items on a honey-do-list they’d finally completed. Rather than showcase something exciting and new, Apple launched the keynote detailing fixes to last year’s “Liquid Glass” design; an overhaul of its awful search function; improvements to its Playground feature; and so on.

Perhaps most importantly, two years after promising but failing to launch a smarter Siri, Apple finally showed off an overhauled version of its AI-powered voice assistant.

But the most telling detail wasn’t what Apple announced. It was how it chose to show some things off. Many of the Apple Intelligence demoes featured someone standing, phone in hand, pressing buttons or using voice commands in real time, while another camera showed off the phone’s response.

These weren’t live onstage, anything-could-go wrong demos; they were pre-taped. But they looked far more like proof of working features than what Apple showed at WWDC 2024, when the company unveiled Apple Intelligence and a new Siri to the world through slickly produced videos that turned out to be more promise than product.

This demonstration style was noticed, with comments on X on Monday comparing today’s keynote to those 2024 so-called “vaporware” demos.

Apple said at that time that the features would be available soon to those who upgraded to the iPhone 15 Pro and newer devices with M1 chips or better. But by March 2025, Apple admitted to Daring Fireball that rolling out the features shown via production video was “going to take us longer than we thought to deliver.” Not long after, the Cupertino company faced a lawsuit in federal court alleging false advertising over the features shown at that 2024 event — a case that carried real reputational risk for a company whose brand has long been built on the promise that its products just work.

Last month, Apple agreed to pay a $250 million settlement on the suit, without admitting wrongdoing.

Monday’s presentation appeared designed, at least in part, to avoid a repeat. There were still plenty of fully produced videos of features, like the one showing how to adjust Siri’s voice and another demonstrating improved voice-to-text transcription. But many of the AI features were shown in this “live-like” format, with someone using the feature on an actual device. The implicit message being that these features work on actual devices, and you will soon have them.

Apple also is not requiring users to buy the latest iPhone to get these features. The new Siri will be available through the new iOS 27 on iPhone 15 Pro and Pro Max and all iPhone 16 models and later, according to the company. The current model is the iPhone 17, meaning most users who upgraded in the past couple of years won’t need to buy new hardware to get access.

It’s a concession, perhaps, that Apple won’t lock the features behind new devices to create upgrade pressure when it promised, two years ago, that such features would be available on iPhone 15.

Apple also said the new features will be available across its broader hardware lineup, including the iPad mini (A17 Pro), iPad models with M1 or later, MacBook Neo (A18 Pro), Mac models with M1 or later, Apple Vision Pro, Apple Watch Series 10 or later, Apple Watch Ultra 2 or later, and Apple Watch SE 3 when paired with an Apple Intelligence-enabled iPhone nearby.