Senator Seeks to End US-UAE Chip Deal, Citing ‘Corruption’
Senate Banking Committee ranking member Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., called on the Trump administration Feb. 1 to cancel plans to sell advanced AI chips to the United Arab Emirates, saying she's worried that President Donald Trump's personal financial ties to the UAE may have overridden national security concerns about the deal.
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Warren indicated she is troubled by a new report showing that a UAE official bought a stake in the Trump family’s cryptocurrency company four days before Trump took office and months before the Middle Eastern country secured access to the chips.
“This is corruption, plain and simple,” Warren said in a statement. “The Trump administration must reverse its decision to sell sensitive AI chips” to the UAE. She also wants administration officials, including Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnik and White House AI policy adviser David Sacks, to testify before Congress “on mounting evidence that they sold out American national security in order to benefit the president’s crypto company -- and about whether any officials lined their own pockets in the process.”
Asked to comment on Warren's statement, White House spokesperson Kush Desai said that "Democrats who stood idly by as the Biden administration freely let advanced semiconductors and other technologies flow overseas are in no place to criticize the Trump administration."
The Commerce Department, the office of Senate Banking Committee Chairman Tim Scott, R-S.C., and the UAE embassy in Washington didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment.
Democratic lawmakers have asserted that the chip deal, unveiled in May, lacks adequate safeguards to prevent China from accessing U.S. technology (see 2505150063 and 2505160049). The administration has insisted that the agreement will provide “strong protections to prevent the diversion of U.S.-origin technology” (see 2505190041).
“The Trump administration is committed to cementing America’s technological dominance and global leadership -- without compromising our national security,” Desai said. "The administration’s recent advanced chip deals with the UAE and Saudi Arabia are conditioned on stringent security and reporting requirements, with the Commerce Department monitoring compliance on an ongoing basis."
Warren’s statement came less than seven weeks after she and other congressional Democrats asked Commerce’s Office of Inspector General to investigate reports that Lutnick pushed the UAE to build data centers in the U.S. in exchange for the easing of American export controls on certain advanced chips (see 2512180082). A Lutnick family business stands to profit from the UAE’s investment, raising conflict of interest concerns, the lawmakers alleged.