U.S. export controls on chips are working and should be maintained, not swapped in a trade deal as part of a “grand bargain” between the Trump administration and Beijing (see 2507150013 and 2508010002), said Rush Doshi, former National Security Council official during the Biden administration.
Senate Banking Committee ranking member Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., and Sen. Elissa Slotkin, D-Mich., urged three government watchdog offices to investigate whether two Trump administration officials had conflicts of interest while advocating for the U.S. to sell advanced AI chips to the United Arab Emirates.
House Select Committee on China Chairman John Moolenaar, R-Mich., “strongly supports” Senate legislation that would require U.S. manufacturers of advanced AI computing chips to make their products available to American firms before selling them to China, the panel said Sept. 22.
The Trump administration’s easing of export restrictions for certain unmanned drones was an overdue decision that could allow American companies to better compete in foreign markets and boost U.S. cooperation with allies, a defense policy researcher and former Pentagon official said Wednesday. During a Center for Strategic and International Studies webinar, they said the announcement highlights the shortcomings of the multilateral Missile Technology Control Regime (MTCR), arguing that it and other U.S. arms control policies have failed to keep up with the pace of technology.
Taiwan is probing the business credentials of a Taiwanese company added to the Bureau of Industry and Security's Entity List earlier this month (see 2509120077), Taiwan's International Trade Administration said, according to an unofficial translation. The company, Shanghai Fudan Microelectronics, is a "representative office of a Hong Kong company in Taiwan," and an "investigation revealed that the representative office does not possess import and export qualifications," Taiwan said. "The Ministry of Economic Affairs will further verify whether the representative office's actual operations are consistent with its original application."
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Although there remains a “contentious” debate around how exactly the U.S. should impose export controls on high-end AI chips, White House adviser Jacob Helberg said he believes the Trump administration will find a way to restrict the most sensitive technologies while still making sure the rest of the world relies on AI hardware, software and models exported from the U.S., not from China. Helberg said he expects the administration to provide clearer answers in the coming months.
Chinese semiconductor company Yangtze Memory Technologies Corp. accused the Bureau of Industry and Security of illegally withholding documents related to its placement on the Entity List, adding that the government acted on "inaccurate" information from YMTC competitors when it imposed stringent export license requirements on the company in 2022. The firm also questioned whether the End-User Review Committee, the interagency group that makes decisions on adding or removing companies from the Entity List, followed proper protocol when it voted to put YMTC on the list.
The U.S. and the U.K. last week signed the Technology Prosperity Deal, which the White House said will boost cooperation on AI, nuclear energy and quantum computing while supporting U.S. national security. A fact sheet said the deal will promote U.S. and U.K. AI exports to "offer the full stack of chips, data centers, and models" and will launch a U.S.-U.K. Quantum Industry Exchange Program to align trade and technology policy. They will also look to increase civil nuclear exports in third countries.
The increasing trend by Wassenaar Arrangement members, including those in the EU, of adopting export controls outside the regime reflects a shift away from multilateral bodies and “increases the risk of a patchwork of controls within the EU single market,” Akin said in a client alert.