China’s leading memory-chip manufacturer ChangXin Memory Technologies has sued the U.S. Department of Defense to overturn its designation as a Chinese military company, escalating a dispute that could further complicate Beijing’s efforts to expand its semiconductor industry and gain access to global markets.

CXMT filed the lawsuit on Friday in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, arguing that the Pentagon lacked sufficient evidence to place the company on its list of Chinese entities deemed to support Beijing’s military.

“CXMT is not affiliated with the Chinese military,” the company said in its complaint. “CXMT designs, produces, and sells its DRAM chips for civilian and commercial use, not for military use.”

The company said the designation had caused significant commercial and reputational damage since it was first imposed in January 2025 and is seeking an order removing its name from the Pentagon’s list.

“Since its initial designation in January 2025, CXMT has continuously suffered reputational and commercial harm,” the company said in a statement to Reuters, adding that it filed the lawsuit to protect its business interests.

The Pentagon designated CXMT under the Biden administration, and President Donald Trump’s administration retained the company on the list in an update issued in June. The designation can expose companies to restrictions involving U.S. government contracting and make it more difficult to establish commercial relationships with American businesses.

But the stakes extend beyond government contracts for CXMT. The company has ambitions to expand internationally and eventually enter the U.S. market, making its continued presence on the Pentagon list a potential obstacle to customers, suppliers, and investors concerned about regulatory risk.

CXMT argues that the Pentagon’s decision was “arbitrary,” lacked adequate evidentiary support, and violated the company’s due-process rights.

According to the complaint, CXMT spent more than a year providing information to the Defense Department in an effort to have its designation overturned.

The company said the Pentagon published a notice in February indicating that CXMT would be removed from the list, only to withdraw the notice the same day. CXMT alleges that the department later failed to adequately explain why it reversed course and retained the company on the blacklist.

“None of these determinations is supported by the factual record, by applicable law, or by reasoned decision-making,” CXMT said.

The dispute illustrates the uncertainty facing Chinese technology companies operating under Washington’s increasingly expansive national-security restrictions. Companies can face commercial consequences even when a designation does not amount to a direct ban on selling products in the United States.

CXMT’s challenge also comes as Washington continues to treat advanced semiconductors and related manufacturing capabilities as strategic assets. Memory chips are an important component of smartphones, computers, servers and artificial intelligence systems, making leading manufacturers relevant to the broader U.S.-China technology rivalry.

Rapid Growth Raises CXMT’s Profile

CXMT has emerged as China’s most important domestic producer of dynamic random-access memory, or DRAM, chips, a market historically dominated by companies such as Samsung Electronics, SK Hynix and Micron Technology.

Its rise is significant for China’s push to reduce dependence on foreign semiconductor suppliers. Washington has imposed restrictions on China’s access to advanced chip technology, equipment and other semiconductor inputs, while Beijing has encouraged domestic companies to develop alternatives.

CXMT’s revenue surged 874% in the first half, underscoring the rapid expansion of its business as Chinese electronics and technology companies seek locally produced memory chips. The company has also been expanding its product portfolio. Its growth in DRAM has increased its strategic importance to China’s semiconductor ambitions, particularly as demand for memory rises alongside spending on artificial intelligence infrastructure.

That progress, however, has brought greater scrutiny from Washington.

The United States has used export controls, investment restrictions and military-related company designations as tools to limit China’s ability to develop technologies considered important to national security. Beijing, in turn, has accelerated efforts to build domestic semiconductor supply chains.

Another Legal Front in U.S.-China Tech War

CXMT’s lawsuit follows a growing number of legal challenges by Chinese companies seeking to contest U.S. government restrictions. In June, Alibaba sued the U.S. government over its inclusion on the Pentagon’s Chinese military company list. Xiaomi, the Chinese smartphone and electric-vehicle manufacturer, successfully challenged its own designation in U.S. court and was removed from the list in 2021.

Those cases offer CXMT a potential legal precedent, although the outcome will depend on the evidence supporting its designation and the Pentagon’s statutory authority.

CXMT’s complaint names Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Deputy Defense Secretary Steve Feinberg, and Assistant Secretary of Defense for Industrial Base Policy Michael Cadenazzi, in addition to the Department of Defense.

The case is expected to become an important test of how far the Pentagon can go in designating Chinese technology companies as military-linked entities and how much evidence it must provide when companies challenge those decisions.

However, analysts have noted that removal from the list would have implications beyond CXMT’s legal standing. It could help reduce the regulatory risk associated with dealing with the company and strengthen its efforts to establish itself as a globally competitive memory-chip supplier.

CXMT’s challenge has come at a time when the semiconductor industry is becoming divided along geopolitical lines. China is investing heavily in domestic chip production, while the United States and its allies are tightening controls on technologies they consider strategically sensitive.

Anthropic has been sued by Sony Music Publishing, Warner Chappell Music and other major music publishers, which accuse the artificial intelligence company of illegally obtaining and using thousands of copyrighted musical works to train its Claude AI models.

The publishers filed the lawsuit Friday in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, naming Anthropic and co-founders Dario Amodei and Benjamin Mann as defendants. They accused the AI company and its founders of conducting what they described as a “brazen campaign of illegally torrenting, scraping, and downloading copyrighted works” on a massive scale.

The case adds the music industry to a growing legal battle over how AI companies obtain the enormous quantities of copyrighted material needed to train generative AI systems.

“Defendants Anthropic and its founders Dario Amodei and Benjamin Mann have conducted a brazen campaign of illegally torrenting, scraping, and downloading copyrighted works on a massive scale in order to develop, operate, and reap enormous profits from Anthropic’s ‘Claude’ series of artificial intelligence (‘AI’) models,” the publishers said in the complaint.

Sony Music Publishing and Warner Chappell said Anthropic obtained “thousands upon thousands” of copyrighted songs, including “Eye of the Tiger,” Marvin Gaye’s “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough,” Mariah Carey’s “All I Want for Christmas is You” and Taylor Swift’s “Paper Rings.”

The publishers allege that Anthropic acquired copyrighted material through several sources, including Library Genesis and Pirate Library Mirror, two digital archives that have been associated with pirated books and other content.

The lawsuit builds on an earlier copyright case against Anthropic involving books. In June 2025, a federal judge ruled that Anthropic had downloaded more than 7 million pirated books to train Claude.

The music publishers argue that those books also contained lyrics and sheet music belonging to their catalogues. They identified works including Bon Jovi’s “Livin’ On a Prayer,” Earth, Wind & Fire’s “September,” Jerry Lee Lewis’ “Great Balls of Fire,” the Allman Brothers Band’s “Ramblin’ Man,” and Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah.”

According to the complaint, the alleged infringement goes beyond the use of copyrighted works during model training. The publishers claim Claude can generate identical or nearly identical versions of copyrighted material in response to users’ prompts.

That allegation could become crucial because the case raises two separate questions for the AI industry: whether copyrighted works can lawfully be used to train AI models and whether AI systems can reproduce protected works closely enough to constitute infringement when responding to users.

The publishers argue that training Claude on copyrighted compositions enables Anthropic to generate lyrics that could compete directly with music created by human songwriters.

“Even the most revolutionary of technologies must develop within the bounds of the law, and Anthropic’s Claude models are no different,” the publishers said in the complaint.

They are seeking statutory damages and have requested a jury trial. Under U.S. copyright law, statutory damages can reach $150,000 per infringed work when the infringement is found to be willful. The potential exposure could therefore become substantial if the publishers succeed in establishing infringement across a large catalogue.

The lawsuit marks another escalation in the confrontation between copyright owners and AI companies over training data.

Generative AI systems require enormous datasets to develop their capabilities, creating a direct conflict with industries whose books, articles, photographs, music and other creative works form part of the material that AI companies seek to acquire.

For the music industry, the dispute has implications beyond compensation. Publishers and songwriters are becoming more concerned that generative AI could become a competitor to the very creators whose work helped train the systems.

The legal strategy also comes at a time when Anthropic is already facing significant financial exposure from copyright litigation. In September, the company agreed to pay more than $1.5 billion to settle a class-action lawsuit brought by authors over the use of pirated books.

Other major AI companies have faced similar lawsuits. OpenAI has been sued by publishers and content owners, including The New York Times and Encyclopedia Britannica, over allegations concerning the use of copyrighted material to train and operate its AI systems.

The cases could ultimately help determine the economics of the AI industry. If courts require companies to obtain licenses for large quantities of copyrighted training material, the cost of developing and operating AI models could rise substantially. If courts allow broader use of copyrighted material under fair use or other legal doctrines, publishers, authors, musicians and other rights holders could face greater pressure to adapt their business models.

The Anthropic case could be especially consequential because music is subject to multiple layers of copyright protection, including rights in compositions and, in many cases, separate rights in sound recordings. A ruling against Anthropic could therefore have implications for how AI companies collect, process, and reproduce musical content at scale.

OpenAI said Friday it plans to stop providing its artificial intelligence models to Cursor, the coding platform recently acquired by Elon Musk’s SpaceX, escalating a long-running dispute between Musk and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.

OpenAI said it proposed November 12, 2026, as the cutoff date for its agreement with Cursor, arguing that it could no longer be confident SpaceX would use its technology in accordance with the company’s terms of service.

“We are making this choice because we cannot be confident that SpaceX will use our technology within our terms of service, based on our experience with Elon Musk’s companies violating contracts,” OpenAI said in a blog post.

The decision adds a new corporate dimension to the bitter rivalry between Musk and Altman. Their dispute dates back years and intensified after Musk sued OpenAI and Altman, alleging that the company had abandoned its original nonprofit mission in pursuit of commercial interests.

Musk dismissed OpenAI’s latest move in a post on X early Saturday, writing, “I couldn’t care less.”

He also accused Altman and OpenAI President Greg Brockman of being “untrustworthy” and repeated his claim that they had “stole[n] an open source nonprofit.”

Musk’s lawsuit, which sought to challenge OpenAI’s transition toward a for-profit structure, went to trial earlier this year. A federal jury ultimately ruled against Musk, finding that he had filed the case too late.

The dispute now threatens to affect Cursor, one of the most prominent AI-powered coding tools. Cursor is developed by Anysphere, which SpaceX agreed to acquire in June in a $60 billion all-stock transaction. SpaceX completed the acquisition earlier this month.

Michael Truell, a Cursor co-founder who is now a SpaceX executive, said on X that Cursor was already in discussions with OpenAI to resolve the dispute.

OpenAI said its agreement with Cursor contained a limited period during which it could terminate the contract following a “change of control,” giving the company grounds to seek an end to the arrangement after SpaceX took ownership.

The company also pointed to its previous experience with Musk-owned businesses. OpenAI said X, formerly Twitter, breached the terms of its contract with OpenAI following Musk’s acquisition of the social media platform.

“To work with a large partner like SpaceX, we typically rely on custom contracts to ensure compliance with our terms of service and that the integration provides for safety at scale,” OpenAI said.

The timing is notable because Cursor has become an important distribution channel for leading AI coding models. Cutting off OpenAI models could force the platform to rely more heavily on competing providers, potentially changing the competitive balance in AI-assisted software development.

Anthropic moved quickly to capitalize on the dispute. Hours after OpenAI announced its decision, Anthropic co-founder Tom Brown said the company planned to increase computing capacity to support Claude models in Cursor. Anthropic already has an ongoing partnership with SpaceX.

That response highlights the broader stakes for AI model providers. Coding platforms such as Cursor sit between frontier-model developers and millions of software developers, making access to those platforms strategically valuable as companies compete to establish their models as the preferred tools for programming and agentic software development.

The dispute also illustrates how ownership changes are becoming a fault line in the AI industry. OpenAI’s decision was not based on Cursor’s technology or its use of AI models itself, but on the identity of its new owner and concerns over contractual compliance.

However, the immediate issue for Cursor is whether it can maintain access to OpenAI models while continuing to operate under SpaceX ownership. For OpenAI, the decision signals a willingness to sacrifice an important distribution relationship rather than accept what it considers unacceptable contractual and safety risks.

The move is another escalation in the Musk-Altman confrontation, which has evolved from a dispute over OpenAI’s corporate structure into a broader contest involving AI models, software developers and powerful technology companies.