Beijing — alibaba A White House memo says China is helping the military target the United States, the Financial Times reported on Friday.
“Alibaba is providing technical support to Chinese military ‘operations’ against targets in the United States,” the memo claimed, according to the FT.
The FT said it could not independently verify the claims and did not publish the full memo. It is not clear when the memo was published. The White House did not respond to a request for comment, but the FT said it stood by its report.
Alibaba said in a statement to CNBC about the FT report that “the claims and insinuations in the article are completely false.”
Alibaba said, “While we question the motives behind the anonymous leak, the FT acknowledges that it cannot be verified.” “This malicious PR ploy clearly comes from dishonest voices seeking to undermine President Trump’s recent trade deal with China.”
US President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping met in South Korea last month for the first time since Trump took office in January for his second term. The leaders agreed to lift tariffs and export controls for 12 months, easing bilateral tensions that escalated this year.
Andy Rothman, founder of the consulting firm Synology, said on CNBC’s “Squawk Box Asia” on Monday that the lack of detail in the FT report “raises questions about whether some China hawks in the administration are trying to break the president’s agreement with Xi Jinping.”
He noted that President Trump has not said anything about the FT report, but noted that all major cloud computing companies in the US have contracts with the US government.
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The United States has stepped up efforts in recent years to restrict China’s access to advanced semiconductors used to train artificial intelligence models.
“The fact that Alibaba’s stock price fell so quickly[following the FT report]shows how alarmed China’s AI industry is about the possibility of new sanctions,” said Kyle Zhang, a fellow at Brookings University who specializes in Chinese technology.
Alibaba shares closed 3.78% lower in the U.S. on Friday following the report, but rose more than 1% in Hong Kong on Monday.
Zhang noted that the FT report comes as Alibaba’s open-source Qwen AI model is gaining popularity in Silicon Valley and poses a growing threat to U.S. AI companies OpenAI and Anthropic’s pay-as-you-go model, while investors are increasingly concerned about the possibility of an AI bubble.
Alibaba is scheduled to release its quarterly results on November 25th, ahead of the opening of the US market.
—CNBC’s Eamon Javers and Elaine Yu contributed to this report.
