China Select Committee Chair Calls for Enhancing Export Controls Amid China’s AI Advances
House Select Committee on China Chairman John Moolenaar, R-Mich., said Jan. 28 that the U.S. should place stronger export controls on technologies critical to the infrastructure of an advanced new Chinese artificial intelligence model.
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Moolenaar said the AI model, developed by startup DeepSeek, is so powerful that its chatbot “openly erases” China’s “history of atrocities and oppression. The U.S. cannot allow Chinese Communist Party models such as DeepSeek to risk our national security and leverage our technology to advance their AI ambitions.”
Moolenaar’s comments came three days after his committee said it warned the Bureau of Industry and Security in early December to close “dangerous loopholes in U.S. chip export controls that could lead to events like" DeepSeek's breakthrough (see 2412060005). The panel noted that Alexandr Wang, the chief executive officer of U.S.-based Scale AI, recently told CNBC that DeepSeek has about 50,000 Nvidia high-performing H100 chips that are allegedly in violation of U.S. export controls.
However, Wang's assertion differs from that of the Atlantic Council, which wrote Jan. 28 that DeepSeek may have relied mainly on Nvidia's less sophisticated H800 chips to train its new AI model, known as R1. An Nvidia spokesperson declined to comment, and BIS had no immediate comment.
Meanwhile, the House Foreign Affairs Committee’s Republican majority alleged Jan. 27 that the “fecklessness of the Biden administration helped create" DeepSeek's chatbot, which it referred to as "ChatCCP," or a Chinese version of the ChatGPT chatbot developed by U.S.-based OpenAI. The GOP majority said it expects the Trump administration “will finally close export control loopholes” to help the U.S. win the global AI competition.
White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters Jan. 28 that the National Security Council is looking into the “national security implications” of the DeepSeek news. At the same time, President Donald Trump considers DeepSeek a “wakeup call to the American AI industry,” and he wants to ease regulations with the goal of “restoring American AI dominance,” Leavitt said.
An analysis released by the Wilson Center Jan. 24 argues that while the U.S. focuses on restricting China’s access to AI chips, China is finding ways to adapt, such as by “developing more efficient, less expensive AI technologies" like DeepSeek R1. The analysis calls for placing more emphasis on American firms competing aggressively in AI.