The Pentagon has added four major Chinese tech names - Alibaba, Baidu, electric-vehicle maker BYD and the robotics company Unitree - to a list of firms it claims support the Chinese military. A move that on paper is an administrative procedure, but in practice is one more front in the cold tech war between Washington and Beijing.

The list is no harmless thing. It's called 1260H, after the section of the 2021 US defence law that created it, and means American companies can be made to face hurdles in any business with the listed firms. With the new names, it now holds 188 companies - almost the entire top league of Chinese artificial intelligence, after Tencent was added last year.

The Chinese firms aren't staying quiet. Baidu responded sharply: "We categorically reject Baidu's inclusion on the list, there is no credible basis for it whatsoever. We will not hesitate to use every available option to remove the company from it." Alibaba said it is "not a Chinese military company" and announced legal steps. A standard reaction - but also a sign that the label hurts where it matters most: in the market.

This year the Pentagon has hit the car industry especially hard. Besides BYD, the list also picked up electric-vehicle maker Nio, the battery plants CALB and EVE Energy, and RoboSense - one of the leading Chinese makers of lidar sensors for autonomous driving. Baidu, in turn, is among the leaders in Chinese self-driving cars. The point is clear: the technology that powers tomorrow's cars is a strategic field today.

The timing is interesting too. The same update to the list was briefly published in February, then pulled from the official register without explanation, only to come out for good now. When a government publishes the same document twice, it's rarely an administrative slip - more often a matter of political timing. The Balkan reader recognises this well: lists are rarely just lists.