By Alexandra Alper WASHINGTON, Dec 4 (Reuters) – A bipartisan group of U.S. senators, including prominent Republican China hawk Tom Cotton, on Thursday unveiled a bill that would block the Trump administration from loosening rules that restrict Beijing’s access to artificial intelligence chips for 2.5 years. The bill, known as the SAFE CHIPS Act, was filed […]
Science
Senators unveil bill to keep Trump from easing curbs on AI chip sales to China
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By Alexandra Alper
WASHINGTON, Dec 4 (Reuters) – A bipartisan group of U.S. senators, including prominent Republican China hawk Tom Cotton, on Thursday unveiled a bill that would block the Trump administration from loosening rules that restrict Beijing’s access to artificial intelligence chips for 2.5 years.
The bill, known as the SAFE CHIPS Act, was filed by Republican Senator Pete Ricketts and Democrat Chris Coons. It would require the Commerce Department, which oversees export controls, to deny any license requests for buyers in China, Russia, Iran or North Korea to receive U.S. AI chips more advanced than the ones they currently are allowed to obtain for 30 months. After that, Commerce would have to brief Congress on any proposed rule changes a month before they take effect.
“Denying Beijing access to (the best American) AI chips is essential to our national security,” Ricketts said in a statement.
The legislation, which was co-sponsored by Republican Dave McCormick and Democrats Jeanne Shaheen and Andy Kim, represents a rare effort led in part by Trump’s own party to stop him from further relaxing tech export restrictions on China.
Faced with new Chinese export curbs on the rare earth metals that global tech companies rely on, Trump’s Commerce Department imposed and then rolled back curbs on Nvidia’s H20 AI chips, a move that was criticized by Republican Representative John Moolenaar, who chairs the House China Select Committee.
As part of negotiations with China to delay its own rare earth controls, Trump pushed back by a year a rule to restrict U.S. tech exports to units of already-blacklisted Chinese companies and has vowed to nix a Biden-era rule restricting AI chip exports globally to countries based in part on concerns around chip smuggling to China.
The bill comes as the Trump administration mulls greenlighting sales of Nvidia’s H200 artificial intelligence chips to China, Reuters reported. China hawks in Washington fear that Beijing could use the prized chips to supercharge its military with AI-powered weapons and more powerful intelligence and surveillance capabilities.
(Reporting by Alexandra Alper; Editing by Leslie Adler)