China Select Committee Chair Proposes New Approach to Chip Export Controls
The head of the House Select Committee on China urged the Trump administration Aug. 25 to adopt a new framework for restricting computing chip exports to China, saying placing certain technical limits on such sales would be a more effective way to keep Beijing’s AI capabilities in check.
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In a letter to Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, Rep. John Moolenaar, R-Mich., proposed a “rolling technical threshold” (RTT) approach in which AI chips sold to China would provide only a “marginal” improvement over the most advanced Chinese-made chips. He would also limit China’s aggregate AI computing power to 10% of that of the U.S. to preserve American dominance in AI.
“Rather than tying our export control threshold to America’s chipmaking capabilities (e.g., selling China our fourth best chip or one with a 50% reduction from the leading edge), we should instead sell only chips that represent up to a marginal improvement over the most advanced chip China can produce domestically at a commercially relevant scale while also limiting China’s aggregate computing power to 10% of that of the U.S.,” Moolenaar wrote. “This allows us to extend Chinese dependence on the U.S. hardware stack while also substantially limiting China’s frontier AI development.”
Moolenaar said the Biden administration’s export control approach “focused too much on specific kinds of chips and not enough on the total amount of AI compute. Maintaining AI dominance is as much about controlling the sale of chips as it is about the overall amount of AI compute that a nation possesses.”
The RTT would be based on four performance metrics: total processing performance, performance density, interconnect speed and memory bandwidth. U.S. intelligence community assessments of China’s chipmaking capability and capacity would help the Bureau of Industry and Security set the RTT and estimate China’s aggregate computing power, Moolenaar said. The technology threshold would apply to remotely accessed chips as well as chip sales.
Moolenaar said his approach would succeed because China remains reliant on U.S. AI chips. While U.S. companies are deploying about 14 million AI chips in 2025, China is expected to produce only 200,000 of its leading AI chips this year, and they are reportedly of low quality. He credited U.S. and allied export controls on chip-making equipment with preventing China from producing cutting-edge chips.
The Commerce Department didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment on Moolenaar’s letter.
The letter came three days after the top Democrat on Moolenaar’s committee, Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi, Ill., introduced a bill that would require Congress, not just the executive branch, to approve the sale of certain advanced AI chips to China (see 2508220015). Krishnamoorthi is concerned the Trump administration might allow China to buy a downgraded version of Nvidia’s most advanced AI chip, the GB300 Blackwell.
Although Krishnamoorthi’s bill would not cover Nvidia’s H20 chip, which the Trump administration recently decided to allow the company to sell to China in exchange for a portion of its sales revenue, Krishnamoorthi and Moolenaar have both raised concerns about providing the H20 to China (see 2507300030). In his letter, Moolenaar said he’s concerned that the R1 AI model that China’s DeepSeek reportedly developed with American chips, including the H20, could allow China to sell AI-enabled weapon systems, such as sophisticated drone swarms, to Iran.