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US Bill Would Mandate AI Chip Location Tracking to Thwart China and Other Adversaries (nbcnews.com) 49

Posted by EditorDavid from the in-the-chips dept.
NBC News reports: A group of companies that specialize in tracking international shipments of sensitive technologies is backing a Capitol Hill bill that would require America's most powerful AI chips to incorporate stronger security mechanisms aimed at preventing the chips from reaching China and other adversaries. The letter, signed by six companies, says the Chip Security Act (CSA) would increase American chip companies' competitiveness and close key loopholes in the U.S. export control regime.

The move clashes with claims from semiconductor lobbying groups that the requirements would constrain America's booming chip industry. Sent to congressional leadership Thursday morning and seen by NBC News, the dispatch instead argues that more robust security verification would assure chip customers and manufacturers that they are abiding by sensitive restrictions on chip sales. The companies argue that the boosted confidence will "lead to increased sales, faster export approvals, larger transactions, greater access to new markets, and more expansive chip deals."

Despite U.S. export control laws banning sales of advanced AI chips to certain countries, including China, loopholes in current requirements have allowed billions of dollars' worth of America's best AI chips to be sold to entities in third-party countries that can then forward them to China. In just one case in March, the Justice Department charged three people with conspiring to forward $2.5 billion of AI chips to China. The CSA aims to address those loopholes, mandating that chip exporters better track where advanced chips are sent, via either bespoke location-verification hardware or software that can run on existing hardware. That, bill proponents claim, would ensure that sensitive chips could be sold to countries like Malaysia or Indonesia without fear of further transfer to China... Experts say that because chips perform the advanced computations required for frontier AI systems, cutting off access to the chips is crucial to prevent geopolitical rivals from using AI systems for military or economic purposes.

US Bill Would Mandate AI Chip Location Tracking to Thwart China and Other Adversaries More | Reply

US Bill Would Mandate AI Chip Location Tracking to Thwart China and Other Adversaries

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  • How Adorable (Score:5, Interesting)

    by crunchy_one ( 1047426 ) on Sunday June 21, 2026 @12:44PM (#66202866)
    It's almost as if the chips in question were being manufactured in the USA.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Kisai ( 213879 )

      The thing is, there is a very easy way to track the chips, just a very hard way to know the final destination especially if intermediaries just sit on them for a time.

      Like the easiest tracking mechanism is to have a mask rom part of each chip have a serial number (remember when this was a big deal with the pentium III?) and production date that is also then read from the chip and printed on the chip when it's packaged. Then when the drivers (for cpu/gpu/ram parts) are first turned on a second write-once spa

    • Re:How Adorable (Score:4, Insightful)

      by anonymouscoward52236 ( 6163996 ) on Sunday June 21, 2026 @03:07PM (#66203016)

      Naw, we still have to hand the entire design to China and tell them, "just don't trigger this bit in the silicon, it will disable the check. DON'T DO IT!"

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

        Is there any info on how this location tracking would work? GPS isn't going to cut it, it needs a battery and world wide cellular/satellite connection to track things being shipped, and once installed will be in a Faraday cage (the server enclosure/rack/datacentre).

        Are they going to rely on it detecting when it is in a Chinese server somehow? Try to get an external IP address? Something in the driver?

        It seems doomed to fail and easily bypassed. I'm sure it will spur further investment in Chinese AI chip man

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by jonwil ( 467024 )

      The companies that design the chips and contract overseas fabs to make them are very much American. The US can absolutely tell, say, NVIDIA that it has to do this with its chips regardless of where they ultimately get made.

  • Having already eliminated global drug, gun and people smuggling, chips should be easy.

  • Attempting to prevent China... (Score:4, Insightful)

    by MpVpRb ( 1423381 ) on Sunday June 21, 2026 @01:02PM (#66202878)

    ...from acquiring tech is futile and counterproductive.
    Chinese engineers and scientists are smart, numerous and good at finding workarounds.
    We should abandon the old cold war ideas and work on cooperation.

    • I don't think you know what the word "cooperation" means to China. Or, more likely, you are a shill.

      • History is full of examples of governments trying and failing to restrict technology. The Venetian Republic attempted to guard glassmaking secrets. European states tried to restrict textile machinery exports during the Industrial Revolution. The Soviet Union acquired Western technology despite extensive Cold War controls. Barriers sometimes slowed diffusion, but they cannot stop it. The advancement of knowledge depends on openness, criticism, and exchange. Scientific progress is cumulative. Every generation
        • Plus, it's easy in China for them to copy any designs any time and replicate them for domestic sale. Protective laws and enforcement are notoriously weak.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by znrt ( 2424692 )

      here the "cold war ideas" are only the smokescreen for another grift. the public is thoroughly trained into that mentality but the narrative is, as usual, laughable except for the most oblivious minds: china doesn't even want nvidia chips anymore, they have their own and will be happy to sell them all over the world including any "other adversaries" of the us (there are plenty indeed, which the us has been actively and systematically making for the last few decades, which makes your suggestion that the us m

  • There is no need to put export controls on AI chips; AI is not intelligent. It has limited usefulness, and even the major players like OpenAI and Anthropic are realizing that they may never become profitable. The entire thing might be a boondoggle 10x the size of Bitcoin. Being worried about someone acquiring this technology is stupid.

    • Just had an issue with the water pump in my home. Chatgpt walked me through the repairs. Thanks, ai!
      It is far from perfect, but it is good enough for a lot of things.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by jonwil ( 467024 )

      Considering what AI (that is built with safeguards and/or restricted in its availability) is already capable of when it comes to finding exploits in software and other dangerous things, imagine what an AI specifically built as an offensive cyber-weapon could be capable of doing.

  • A group of companies that specialize in tracking international shipments of sensitive technologies is backing a Capitol Hill bill that would require

    ...tracking international shipments of sensitive technologies.

    That's the point.

    It doesn't matter if the tracking is effective in stopping the chips from reaching China. And the chips don't even need to be in China for them to be run by the Chinese; strangely enough, datacenters can be connected to the internet.

    But every chip will need to pay the tracking tax.

  • Whereas AI Chip is Also Your Video Card (Score:3)

    by BrendaEM ( 871664 ) on Sunday June 21, 2026 @01:18PM (#66202894) Homepage
    Every decedent video chip could be considered an AI chip. So, what are they talking about?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by allo ( 1728082 )

      Probably everything above a certain rate of floating point operations. Which means your future 6090 card would probably need to have such a chip.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by ceoyoyo ( 59147 )

      The United States started restricting export of computers in 1949. When the G4 exceeded the performance limit to be classified as a mulition in 1999 Apple ran ads about it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]

      "Advanced computations required for frontier AI" sounds better than "adds and multiplies faster than our arbitrary limit" and way less stupid than "now that this is a munition we have discontinued the translucent blueberry and frost white color option in favour of a more professional 'graphite' color sche

  • Funny how that is impossible (Score:5, Insightful)

    by gweihir ( 88907 ) on Sunday June 21, 2026 @01:27PM (#66202918)

    I guess the people making laws are still completely unaware that it is not them defining how reality works. Dumb and dumber ...

  • You need to scan your drivers license to buy medicine for your runny nose. How long before you need to have your government ID on file to buy any video card with 32GB of ram (like the 5090 or an R9700)? That's where this is really heading. Tracking all off-cloud AI usage like it's a weapon.

  • Closing the Barn Door After the Horses Left (Score:3)

    by organgtool ( 966989 ) on Sunday June 21, 2026 @02:07PM (#66202962)
    We can't let China get access to our chip technologies! Sure, we'll upload all of the documents necessary to manufacture these chips to a Taiwanese company, but once that company manufactures those chips we should spend millions of dollars making sure they're not directly shipped to China.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by PPH ( 736903 )

      not directly shipped to China

      All the more motivation for China to leave the current border in place.

    • At the rate China is going in several years I expect them to have home grown AI chips with similar performance.

  • They are a geopolitical competitor whom the US (West in general) is falling behind. We used to hear all this talk of free markets, free trade, rules based order and globalism when the West was dominating. Now that they are falling behind it all goes out the window. Rather than try to build up the US and its populace to compete, via infrastructure spending, free education, universal healthcare it chooses to double down on an imperialistic strategy - intervene in Venezuela, Cuba, Iran (failed!), annex Greenla

    • The silly things that happened in the last decades is:
      - decline in local capabilities
      - don't build, buy cheap on the world market
      - world market (China / Venezuela) reacts and supplies the market
      - cry because some self invented enemy controls the world market
      - invent lies and blame them for slavery and other absurd things, like pollution
      - then invade and steal what you can ... worked in Venezuela, did not work in Iran

      And: everyone involved knew the dates and could buy shares or options or make future trade d

  • Nah (Score:2)

    by PPH ( 736903 )

    Just have the chips determine their current location. And return wrong results [wikipedia.org] if they are outside of preprogrammed boundaries.

  • Which would qualify....

  • will still find ways to sell them to banned nations.

  • is and always will be impossible.

  • If we want to dominate AI development, we should ensure everyone uses the chips we design.

    We want China to use our chips. If we don't let them, they will just build their own.

    Roughly half of all AI researchers are located in China. They should be dependent on our stuff.

  • Seems like plenty of people at NVIDIA would work harder not to let their products get into the wrong hands if they would feel pain when they failed.

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