Congress Urged to Pass Two Bills to Tighten Chip Export Controls
Enacting two pending export control bills into law could help keep U.S. AI technology out of China’s hands, an advocacy group representative told the House Select Committee on China June 25.
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The Chip Security Act, which would require export-controlled advanced computing chips to contain location verification mechanisms, would help ensure such chips are not diverted to China, said Mark Beall Jr., president of government affairs at the AI Policy Network. Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., and Rep. Bill Huizenga, R-Mich., introduced the legislation in May (see 2505090015 and 2505150035).
Beall also called for passage of the Remote Access Security Act, which would close a loophole that has allowed China to use cloud service providers to access advanced U.S. chips remotely (see 2504070072). The House Foreign Affairs Committee approved the bill in April (see 2504090052).
Such measures are needed because existing U.S. export controls have “a number of very glaring gaps in them,” evidenced by reports of large-scale smuggling of advanced AI chips into China, Beall said.
Jack Clark, co-founder and head of policy at Anthropic, testified that the Commerce Department needs to have a “greater level of technical staff” to design and monitor export controls. “We’re dealing with the most advanced technology that people make on the planet and trying to control that will require us to, I believe, scale up the resourcing for the people designing those regulations and then monitoring compliance with them,” Clark said.
Clark’s comments came in response to Rep. Ritchie Torres, D-N.Y., who asked whether chip controls imposed in 2022 were properly designed. Torres said he’s "heard concerns that even though the chips to which China had access had less computational power, it actually had more memory bandwidth than the best" graphic processing units.
Thomas Mahnken, president and CEO of the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, testified that AI-related export controls are “extremely important” but “we should not imagine that that’s going to be sufficient to deal with the challenge. Because, I think, over time, the Chinese are going to get better, others are going to get better, so we need to couple export controls with other measures.”
Beall said the U.S. should be cautious about building AI data centers overseas. While certain foreign countries can offer plenty of energy to power the centers, "you don't want to let foreign countries become the AI superpowers, and we don't want our chips being diverted in places that are not friendly to the United States," he testified.
"It's sort of the devil's in the details," Beall added. If the overseas centers and their chips are under U.S. control, "that's one thing. If they're under local national control, that's another, and the security package that goes along with that will need to be carefully scrutinized."