WASHINGTON — Lawmakers at a House of Foreign Affairs hearing on Tuesday called for stronger export enforcement mechanisms to stop China from smuggling American AI chips for Chinese technological development.
The Bureau of Industry and Security declared in January that chip exports to China will be reviewed on a case-by-case basis “to ensure the national security benefits” by maintaining U.S. leadership in the AI arms race.
Republican and Democrat lawmakers agree with the need to protect America’s advanced chips but disagreed about strategies to secure America’s AI leadership.
Rep. Gabe Amo, D-R.I., argued that the Bureau of Industry and Security’s enforcement changes in January significantly loosened export controls and allowed China to purchase Nvidia H200 chips more easily. Nvidia H200 chips are critical to the AI race.
Amo said that President Donald Trump had already put U.S. national security at risk after his decision late last year to approve chip exports to Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, two countries that have close ties with China and Trump’s family businesses.
“We now know a UAE sovereign wealth fund made a $500 million deal with the Trump family to purchase a 49% stake in that same cryptocurrency company,” Amo said. “These overlapping financial interests raise serious questions about how Trump is abusing our export controls and whether they are being used to enrich government officials and their families.”
Nvidia H200 exports, along with other chips China needs to train its AI software, must meet criteria like the “No Prohibited Use” requirement, where barred individuals or companies cannot use U.S.-exported chips.
However, the Trump administration recently found that China’s DeepSeek AI platform used American chips to train its latest model. This raised concerns about whether the bureau’s enforcements adequately protect U.S. technological leadership and military superiority.
Republican lawmakers focused on making sure that domestic tech companies and employees do not leak valuable information to China and other foreign adversaries.
Rep. James Moylan, R-Guam, referenced a case last month involving a former Google engineer who stole thousands of documents on Google’s AI trade secrets. Witness David Peters, the Assistant Secretary of Commerce for Export Enforcement at the Bureau of Industry and Security, said the bureau is “in regular communication with companies.”
“We seek to go out and educate our partners in the business community because, truly, it’s through them that we tend to identify a lot of these potential violations,” Peters said.
However, some Republican lawmakers were concerned if U.S. companies were aware of the consequences of violating export controls.
When Rep. Keith Self, R-Texas, asked whether companies “price in the cost of violations into the cost of doing business,” Peters said that the Bureau of Industry and Security does not know. He instead blamed companies’ “underinvestment in [their] compliance and due diligence” departments.
Some Democratic lawmakers drew attention to whether overseas companies were on the same page in enforcing strong export controls.
“We want to make sure that our partners in other countries are working in tandem with us and have the resources that we need them to have to be able to identify and prosecute illegal activity,” Rep. Sydney Kamlager-Dove, D-Calif., said.
When Kamlager-Dove asked if the bureau “is willing to commit to more training and capacity building in companies overseas,” Peters said that they plan to expand their export control officer program, which is for U.S. officials at U.S. embassies abroad who monitor international compliance with U.S. export control laws.
At the end of the session, Rep. Bill Huizenga, R-Mich., the Chairman of the House of Foreign Affairs Committee, asked how many checks on exports to China were conducted last year. Peters said that he does not have the exact number of end use checks performed last year and would follow up with the bureau.