CXMT sues the Pentagon to leave the Chinese military company list

ChangXin Memory Technologies, China’s largest DRAM producer, sued the US Department of Defense on Friday over its place on the Pentagon’s list of Chinese military companies. The complaint says CXMT is not affiliated with the People’s Liberation Army and that it designs, makes and sells memory chips for civilian and commercial use. It calls the designation arbitrary, unsupported by evidence and a breach of due process. The company wants the label lifted.

The Pentagon first named CXMT in January 2025, in the last weeks of the Biden administration. CXMT says it then spent more than a year sending documents and asking to come off the list. It was briefly removed in February 2026 and put back on 8 June, in a Trump administration update that also restored Yangtze Memory Technologies. The Defence Department told Reuters it does not comment on pending litigation.

Section 1260H of the National Defense Authorization Act is the statute behind the list. It does not ban private trade. It stops US government agencies and their defence contractors from contracting with named firms. The reputational effect is wider. Banks, insurers and export-control teams treat a 1260H name as a risk flag even when the statute does not reach them. That is why a DRAM company that sells into phones and servers would spend a year writing letters and then file in court.

YMTC sued on the same theory in December 2025, arguing that the designation violated the Administrative Procedure Act. Chinese technology firms have begun to treat US lists as something that can be litigated rather than only endured. A federal judge in San Francisco this week vacated a separate Pentagon supply-chain label on Anthropic. That case turned on retaliation, not on 1260H, but it is the atmosphere in which CXMT filed.

DRAM is a choke point. CXMT is the domestic name Beijing has backed to cut reliance on Samsung, SK Hynix and Micron. US export rules already squeeze the equipment those plants need. A military-company tag adds a second problem: American contractors cannot buy the chips, and allied firms that sell to the Pentagon have a reason to drop CXMT from their own bills of materials. The lawsuit cannot unwind export controls. It can only attack the process by which this particular list was compiled.

What a judge will want is the administrative record. If the Pentagon can show a documented link between CXMT’s output and a PLA end user, the arbitrary-and-capricious claim gets harder. If the file is a set of inferences from ownership and location, CXMT has a path that YMTC is already walking. Friday’s filing puts that record on a docket. Until it is public, the list still says what it said on 8 June.