In widening its punishment of China in the ongoing US-China trade war, the US has extended its blacklist to directly handicap its biggest competition in a much higher stakes race, for world domination in AI. Recently, almost ten more AI companies – including providers of video surveillance, facial and speech recognition and data recovery; were added to US trade black list. The reasons cited were related to the violation of human rights by the supposed usage of AI technology in China's repression the Muslim ethnic minority groups of the Uygur region. Here is an interesting digression; that one of the most notable Chinese AI companies in this most recent US blacklist is SenseTime Group (known for its facial recognition AI tech), whose founder Tang Xiao'ou was appointed as the foreign national to Malaysia's sovereign wealth fund, Khazanah Nasional. SenseTime is the top AI'unicorns' startup from China with a valuation of over USD7 billion.

Donald Trump's latest salvo against China threatens to derail a $1 billion coming-out party for a prominent startup backed by Alibaba Group Holding Ltd., while curtailing the country's broader ambitions of leading artificial intelligence in the coming decade. The US placed eight Chinese technology giants on a US blacklist on Monday, accusing them of being implicated in human rights violations against Muslim minorities in the country's far-western region of Xinjiang. Among those singled out for sweeping American export restrictions were SenseTime Group Ltd., the world's largest AI startup, and Megvii Technology Ltd. -- two giant enterprises Beijing is counting on to spearhead advances into a revolutionary technology, aided by billions of dollars in foreign backing. The White House's actions -- announced days before sensitive trade negotiations resume in Washington -- cast a pall over not just Megvii's capital-raising effort but the burgeoning Chinese sector. Leading players like SenseTime and Megvii, already having trouble securing financing during an economic downturn, had considered international forays to sustain a sizzling pace of growth.

The listing carries no penalties but will likely be an embarrassment for Alibaba, which has been trying to burnish its image in international markets. The move by the USTR comes even as the company claims to have used "big data" technologies to zero in, for example, on 13 factories and shops that were selling knockoff RAM modules under Kingston and Samsung brands, according to Alibaba's news hub Alizila. Its counterfeit goods monitoring and identification algorithm, for example, monitors about 100 dimensional characteristics, ranging from price to the online shops decorations, transaction records, product-release pattern and consumer complaints. Merchants and goods are rated on a 0 to 100 scale, with 80 usually treated as a red flag. The company also uses optical character recognition and the scanning and analysis of images and logos for suspicious listings.