AI can demystify supply chain regulations for global businesses — if geopolitics don’t get in the way

Altana, a software company that helps brands like Wayfair map their global supply chains, has been barred by the Chinese Ministry of Commerce from doing business with individuals or companies in the country.

It’s an example of how geopolitics continue to complicate the supply chain, even while technology advancements like AI offer new solutions.

The August 5 move came after the US banned imports from dozens of additional Chinese companies over alleged human rights abuses in late July 2026.

In addition to Altana, the six other companies on China’s list are the nonprofits Responsible Business Alliance and Verité Group, the human-rights NGO Human Rights in China, and the natural-fiber lab-testing company Stratum Reservoir.

The countermeasures list also included Applied DNA Sciences, which recently changed its name to BNB Plus Corp and pivoted from fiber tracking to blockchain services in the cryptocurrency space.

Altana sells its software to businesses so they can uncover forced labor risks and meet strict regulatory compliance.

To do that, Altana collects and buys data points from businesses around the world, including in China.

The company’s inclusion on the list could make it more difficult to provide some of this data to its clients, like Wayfair.

A Wayfair spokesperson told Business Insider, “While this is a new development, we remain committed to using technology to see deeper into and better understand our supply chain.” Altana declined to provide a comment to Business Insider about the actions and how they will affect its software going forward, but did previously speak to Business Insider about the work it has been doing on supply chain mapping.

For a company like Wayfair — one that sources 40 million products globally from 20,000 suppliers — abiding by US government prohibitions requires continuous visibility and cross-checking across multiple supply chain tiers.

It’s a complex process since the company “can’t manage what we don’t see,” Evan Friedler, the director of regulatory and government affairs at Wayfair, told Business Insider during a July interview.

Previously, Wayfair contracted with third-party companies and used internal systems to cross-check its supply chain against unauthorized parties, but “getting to the first tier of the supply chain has historically been the easy part,” Friedler said.

Visibility often ended there, leaving factors like questionable labor practices or prohibited companies working in second or third-tier suppliers a mystery.

Wayfair’s increasingly global scale and a rising regulatory bar made it more important to reach those other tiers, and AI technology finally made it more possible, Friedler said.

About two years ago, Wayfair began working with Altana to go beyond that first tier and look higher up on the supply chain — and with fewer manual checks, Friedler said. “This solution helps us proactively manage risk rather than react to it.” Evan Smith, Altana’s cofounder and CEO, said the platform is like “Google Maps for the supply chain.” Altana draws from paid and free public-domain data and secures rights to certain insights from client and user data sets as they are processed through its system, said Smith.

The company won’t share confidential customer data, such as pricing or bill-of-materials details.

Still, they can use the data they obtain to enrich the existing picture of the world supply chain graph, said Smith. “It’s a contributory network where everyone’s hooking their data and their users into a platform that allows for that shared visibility,” he said.

At Wayfair, Altana is used for labor compliance and denied-party issues.

For example, Altana notifies Wayfair when suppliers potentially match a government-published list of forced labor or denied parties.

Wayfair’s compliance team can investigate these risks sooner than before it adopted the technology, said Friedler.

Previously, Wayfair used manual signals and self-reported supplier information for its supply chain diligence.

Altana also uses agentic AI workflows to ingest and store vast quantities of data, pulling in reference information such as the full body of US Customs rulings on product classification.

Wayfair workers can click into the provided background information to see the AI’s reasoning and underlying documentation for potential issues so they have the evidence they need to substantiate any AI-issued determinations.

Most of Wayfair’s alerts are ultimately false positives.

The Wayfair compliance team investigates potential issues, which can mean confirming company names and spellings, double-checking the supplier’s region, or calling suppliers for more information.

Wayfair then updates the Altana alerts on the platform with this information, which they’d typically be unable to uncover through their own manual processes, Friedler said.