Alibaba is helping Chinese military to target U.S., White House memo claims: FT

BEIJING — Alibaba is helping the Chinese subject to people the U.S., according to a White House memo, the Financial Times reported Friday.

The memo alleged "Alibaba provides tech enactment for Chinese subject 'operations' against targets successful the U.S.," according to the FT.

The FT said it could not independently verify the claims, and did not people a afloat mentation of the memo. It was not wide erstwhile the memo was released. The White House did not respond to requests for comment, portion the FT said it stood by its reporting.

"The assertions and innuendoes successful the nonfiction are wholly false," Alibaba said successful a connection to CNBC connected the FT report.

"We question the information down the anonymous leak, which the FT admits that they cannot verify," Alibaba said. "This malicious PR cognition intelligibly came from a rogue dependable looking to undermine President Trump's caller commercialized woody with China."

U.S. President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping met successful South Korea past period for the first clip since Trump began his 2nd term successful January. The leaders agreed to a rollback of tariffs and export controls for 12 months, easing bilateral tensions that person escalated this year.

The deficiency of details successful the FT study "does rise the question of whether immoderate of the China hawks successful the medication are trying to undercut the President's woody with Xi Jinping," Andy Rothman, laminitis of consulting steadfast Sinology, said Monday connected CNBC's "Squawk Box Asia."

He pointed retired that Trump had not said thing astir the FT report, portion noting that each the large U.S. unreality computing companies person contracts with the U.S. government.

The U.S. has ramped up efforts implicit the past fewer years to restrict China's entree to precocious semiconductors for grooming artificial quality models.

"The information that Alibaba's banal terms dropped truthful rapidly successful effect [to the FT report] shows however overmuch China's AI manufacture is connected borderline implicit imaginable caller sanctions," said Kyle Chan, a Brookings chap who focuses connected China tech.

Alibaba shares had closed 3.78% little successful the U.S. connected Friday pursuing the report, but were up much than 1% successful Hong Kong connected Monday.

Chan pointed retired the FT study comes arsenic Alibaba's open-source Qwen AI model is increasing successful popularity successful Silicon Valley, expanding the menace to the pay-to-use models from U.S. AI companies OpenAI and Anthropic — portion investors are progressively disquieted astir a possible AI bubble.

Alibaba is acceptable to merchandise quarterly results connected Nov. 25 up of the U.S. marketplace open.

—CNBC's Eamon Javers and Elaine Yu contributed to this report.