Shutting the Patent Office Door: YMTC and the Entity List

By Dennis Crouch

USPTO Director John Squires is increasingly positioning the patent system as an instrument of both national and international technology policy.  In October 2025, Dir.  Squires foreshadowed an anti-China approach within the U.S. patent system.  That endeavor appears to now be taking its first steps with a Show Cause order requiring Yangtze Memory Technologies Company (YMTC) to justify why its IPR petitions against Micron patents should proceed despite being named on the Department of Commerce's Entity List as an organization "reasonably believed to be involved, or to pose a significant risk of being or becoming involved, in activities contrary to the national security or foreign policy interests of the United States."  Yangtze Memory Technologies Co. v. Micron Technology, Inc., IPR2025-00098, IPR2025-00099, Paper 33 (USPTO Nov. 10, 2025).  YMTC's Ropes & Gray attorneys have until the 24th of November to reply.

To be clear, YMTC is not an ordinary China-based company.  YMTC reached the Entity List after first being placed on the Unverified List in October 2022 when BIS was unable to complete end-use checks to verify that exported technology was being used as declared. Under President Biden, YMTC was added to the Entity List based on findings that the company creates a major risk of diversion (sharing key technology) with other parties on the entities list, including Huawei and Hangzhou Hikvision.  In January 2024, the Department of Defense also designated YMTC as a "Chinese Military Company Operating in the United States." The company was founded in 2016 by partially state-owned Tsinghua Unigroup with approximately $24 billion in initial investment including substantial funding from the Hubei provincial government and the state-owned China Integrated Circuit Industry Investment Fund, and later received billions more in government capital infusions. Congressional correspondence has highlighted YMTC's alleged ties to the Chinese Communist Party and People's Liberation Army, and noted that some YMTC executives previously worked for Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corporation, another Entity List designee.

So, the idea here is that YMTC is a potential quiet saboteur.  Micron has been ringing this bell loudly for years.  Of course, Micron also has an enormous financial interest in villainizing YMTC.  In addition to its Entity status, Micron has also argued that the Chinese Government is a Real-Party-in-Interest that should have been named in the IPR petition. And, in the background is a legalistic argument that Return Mail should be extended to preclude IPR petitions where a any national government is petitioner or RPI.  Although this post is focused on YMTC, I also want to note that the Entity List has become a principal tool of U.S. economic and technology policy toward China, with hundreds of Chinese entities now listed.

One question here is whether USPTO actions against YMTC can be reconciled with U.S. commitments under international patent treaties.

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