Citing a Financial Times report that Chinese artificial intelligence developers are evading controls on advanced semiconductors by using cloud services, members of the House introduced a bill to stop those practices, called Closing Loopholes for the Overseas Use and Development of Artificial Intelligence (CLOUD AI). The bill was introduced last month, and its text published this week.
The Congressional Research Service this month issued an updated version of its overview of the Committee on Foreign Investment in the U.S. The report notes Congress is proposing legislation to expand CFIUS jurisdiction over certain land purchases and potentially add the USDA secretary as a permanent member of the committee (see 2307280052 and 2307180022). CRS listed several items Congress should be considering, such as how the Treasury Department will implement any “new agriculture-related responsibilities in regulation and practice”; how “sufficient are CFIUS’ current authorities” now that five years have passed since the Foreign Investment Risk Review Modernization Act was enacted; and how the Commerce Department’s process of identifying emerging and foundational technologies for export controls is “facilitating or hindering CFIUS reviews of transactions related to such technologies.”
President Joe Biden signed the U.S.-Taiwan Initiative on 21st-Century Trade First Agreement Implementation Act into law Aug. 7 but said there are constitutional concerns with language that would require the U.S. trade representative to provide negotiating texts to the House Ways and Means and Senate Finance committees "in the midst of negotiations," and would also preclude USTR from presenting its text to Taiwan while Congress is reviewing it.
Rep. Rick Larsen, D-Wash., one of the shrinking number of members of Congress who advocate for engaging with China rather than punishing it, recently published a white paper of his views on how to manage competition with China, how to use both offensive and defensive measures to compete with China, how to improve U.S. governance and competitiveness, and how to identify areas of cooperation.
House Republicans this week urged the Biden administration not to strike a deal with Beijing after Chinese officials reportedly offered to restart counter-narcotics activities with the U.S. in exchange for lifting certain trade restrictions. Beijing asked the U.S. to lift restrictions on the Ministry of Public Security’s Institute of Forensic Science, The Wall Street Journal recently reported. The institute was added to the Entity List in 2020 for its ties to human rights violations.
House and Senate Republicans introduced a bill this week that would force nonprofits, university endowments, public pension plans and other tax-exempt entities to divest from Chinese companies or lose their tax-exempt status. The Dump Investments in Troublesome Communist Holdings Act would also require the Treasury Department to publish a report within one year of the bill’s enactment to describe the “patterns of outbound investment into China generally, including a sectoral breakdown,” the House Select Committee on China said in an Aug. 1 news release.
Rep. Michael McCaul, R-Texas, applauded the Biden administration's July 28 drawdown of a weapons package for Taiwan but said the “much-needed” sale “should have occurred much earlier and could have been more robust.” McCaul, one of Congress’ most vocal critics of what he said has been a delay by the Biden administration of weapons sales to the island (see 2302210012 and 2306270027), said the administration “should have been expediting weapons deliveries to Taiwan.” The U.S. “must remain committed to providing necessary defense articles to enable Taiwan in maintaining deterrence and self-defense capability,” he said.
The top lawmakers on the House Select Committee on China urged the Commerce Department to strengthen its Oct. 7 China chip controls, saying Chinese firms have “identified workarounds.” In a letter last week to Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo, Reps. Mike Gallagher, R-Wis., and Raja Krishnamoorthi, D-Ill., said the interim final rule’s threshold for the “bidirectional transfer rate of 600 Gbyte/s should be lowered sufficiently to prevent clever engineering that bypasses the regulations.” They also said the rule, which will be updated in the coming months when finalized by the Bureau of Industry and Security (see 2307260071), should address Chinese firms using cloud computing services to “outsource their advanced computing needs” and evade the export controls (see 2303210037 and 2305160092).
A Senate bill with bipartisan support could lead to new human rights sanctions on top Iranian government officials, including its supreme leader and its president. The Mahsa Amini Human Rights and Security Accountability Act, introduced last week by Sens. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., and Alex Padilla, D-Calif., would require the administration to report on people in Iran responsible for human rights violations, including against Iranians protesting last year's death of Amini, who died in the custody of the country’s morality police. The bill would require the administration to impose “applicable sanctions” on people identified in the report.
The Haiti Criminal Collusion Transparency Act, a bill that requires the State Department to report on ties between criminal gangs and political and economic elites in Haiti (see 2302140049 and 2303280040), and asks the administration to impose sanctions based on what it finds, passed the House by voice vote July 25.