Lawmakers Push Bill to Give Congress Oversight of Advanced AI Chip Sales
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Mast’s bill gives Congress similar oversight of foreign advanced AI chip sales as lawmakers have over foreign arms sales, with a 30-day window to review and reject export licenses by joint resolution.
“When the United States considers selling a C-130 or fighter jet or an engine that goes on one of those airframes ... or anything that has military use, it goes through a process known as the foreign military sales process,” Mast said during the Jan. 21 hearing.
Mast introduced the bill in December after President Donald Trump announced plans to approve Nvidia H200 chip sales to China. Nvidia had previously come out with separate “degraded” Hopper chips made less powerful in order to satisfy export controls to China, and the new rule would do away with the need to manufacture separate chips.
Bill Response
On Jan. 14, Mast chaired a hearing where lawmakers and experts questioned the prudence of the rule, given that Trump has set ambitious goals for the United States to beat China in the AI race, and analysts have estimated that legal pathways for Chinese tech giants to use H200 chips en masse could wipe out the United States’ lead. Hearing participants avoided criticizing Trump directly, but singled out tech companies and the president’s advisers several times in denouncing the new rule.Mast defended the bill in response and held the committee vote, pushing it forward.
Mast said in the statement and at the Jan. 21 committee meeting that his bill was in line with Trump’s administration goals, including the new rule that specifies the chips should not go to Chinese military companies and not cause a domestic shortage in advanced AI chips.
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said at the World Economic Forum on Jan. 21 that the chips are effectively sold out, and that even renting cloud access to older generation AI chips is becoming more expensive for customers because of the high demand.
The bill passed in the committee with broad bipartisan support.
Co-sponsor Rep. Gregory Meeks (D-N.Y.) said during the Jan. 21 meeting he would have preferred that the bill ban H200 sales to China outright, and provisions to block Nvidia Blackwell AI chips for sale to foreign adversaries as well.
The sole abstention was committee Vice Chair Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.). He said that while he supports the bill and its intention, he’s concerned that it puts Congress in a regulator role and creates an impractical process.
For example, the bill could allow Congress to “take back a product that has been weeks or months in preparation,” Issa said, and it would effectively start the sales process after Congress’s review, adding new layers of uncertainty to contracts.
The Trump administration weighed in on the bill only to make technical corrections and expand the list of countries of concern so far. Issa said he hoped lawmakers would work with the administration over the next few weeks to amend the bill so that Congress has oversight, but the Commerce Department’s Bureau of Industry and Security remains the lead on the export controls process.
“We absolutely do not want to sell the modern equivalent of the rope that hangs us to the adversary,” he said.
Bill sponsor Rep. James Moylan (R-Guam) said AI export controls need to cover not just chips, but also “include the whole ecosystem from the software to the manufacturing equipment to the cloud systems. Our controls have to be dynamic and informed across a rapidly changing environment.”
