Commerce Department Designates Erik Prince's Frontier Services Group as National Security Threat for PLA Support—Five Years After Carbyne Co-Founder Worked There

The U.S. Bureau of Industry and Security added Frontier Services Group (FSG) to the Entity List on June 14, 2023, designating the company as acting “contrary to the national security or foreign policy interests of the United States” for providing training and support to China’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA). FSG, founded by Blackwater’s Erik Prince, was majority-owned by CITIC Group, a Chinese state-owned investment fund that held approximately 26% of FSG’s issued share capital as the company’s largest shareholder. The Entity List designation subjects FSG to additional licensing requirements and effectively blocks U.S. technology exports to the company.

The timing of the designation exposes a catastrophic regulatory failure: The Commerce Department sanctioned FSG five years after Carbyne co-founder Lital Leshem joined the company as Executive Director for Global Business Development in 2018, two years after she left in 2021, and years after Carbyne had already deployed its emergency communications technology to 911 centers across 18+ U.S. states. Leshem, a Forbes 30 Under 30 honoree with Israeli military intelligence background, worked simultaneously at FSG (funded by the Chinese government through CITIC) while retaining her role as Carbyne co-founder during the critical period when Carbyne was rapidly expanding its footprint in American public safety infrastructure.

Despite the federal government eventually acknowledging that FSG threatened national security due to its Chinese state ownership and PLA support activities, no parallel investigation or review of Carbyne was conducted, even though the companies shared a key executive during Carbyne’s most aggressive U.S. deployment phase. The Entity List designation came too late to prevent the personnel overlap or scrutinize whether technology, expertise, or intelligence could have flowed between FSG’s Chinese state-backed operations and Carbyne’s access to sensitive U.S. emergency communications systems. By the time Commerce acted against FSG, Carbyne had already embedded itself deeply in American 911 infrastructure across nearly two dozen states, with direct access to emergency calls, location data, video streams, and real-time communications between first responders and the public. The regulatory failure allowed a company with documented personnel ties to Chinese state-funded operations to deploy unchecked throughout critical U.S. public safety networks.