U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., said on Tuesday she plans to co-sponsor a bipartisan bill with Indiana Republican Sen. Jim Banks to ban the sale of certain artificial intelligence chips to China. The proposal aims to tighten relevant export controls and give Congress greater checks and balances on foreign export issues to limit the Trump administration's space to export advanced AI chips to "rival countries."
The legislative impetus comes from a growing consensus within Congress to strengthen high-tech export security and is the latest move after President Trump approved NVIDIA (NVIDIA) to sell some chips to China under limited conditions. The Warren camp hopes to use legislative means to restrict the administrative department's flexible operations in the export of high-performance computing chips to China and prevent key technologies from being used by rival countries.
Warren announced the plan after meeting with Dario Amodei, CEO of artificial intelligence company Anthropic. Amodei has been publicly calling for strict restrictions on the sale of high-end U.S. computing chips to China. He first met with Republican members of the Senate Banking Committee that day, and then held a separate meeting with Warren, the leader of the Democratic Party. Warren said after the meeting that the two sides had a good exchange on "the importance of keeping high-tech chips in the United States" and also discussed artificial intelligence security issues.
Warren revealed that the Senate version of the bill she and Banks are about to introduce will correspond to the "AI Overwatch Act" that the House of Representatives previously passed the Foreign Affairs Committee. The bill includes a two-year ban on the sales of Nvidia's Blackwell series of chips to China and authorizes the White House to add more countries to the ban list in the future as the situation changes. Despite opposition from White House AI chief David Sacks and some MAGA figures such as Laura Loomer, the bill successfully passed the House Foreign Affairs Committee last month.
Warren pointed out that this new proposal she and Banks made is essentially a "redesign" of the GAIN AI Act that the White House opposed last year. The latter had required chip companies to give priority to meeting the procurement needs of customers in the United States before exporting to "countries of concern" (including China). She also said she would co-sponsor another bill with Arkansas Republican Senator Tom Cotton to prevent these products from being transferred to the United States' foreign adversaries and abused by implementing a stricter tracking mechanism for advanced chips.
In this controversy, the White House and Sacks sided more with Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang. The latter's view is that making China highly dependent on American technology for high-end chips will actually limit its ability to surpass the United States in the chip field, which will help the United States maintain its technological dominance in the long run. Warren refuted this, saying that it is crucial to show a strong cross-party consensus on defense and security issues. "Selling these chips to China is a bad thing in the short term, and it is even worse in the long term."
Amodei said in an interview with the media last month that his core message to members of Congress includes promoting artificial intelligence transparency legislation, cutting off the export of advanced chips and other high-tech components to countries such as China, and taxing "super-rich" AI executives. North Carolina Republican Senator Thom Tillis, who met with Amodei, pointed out that the Anthropic CEO’s view is that if states are to preempt states from enacting their own laws to regulate AI at the federal level, then an alternative regulatory framework must be established at the national level, “and I think he is right.”
South Dakota Republican Senator Mike Rounds said that Amodei and Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang have "differences of opinion" on the issue of chip sales to China, but both of them agree on a general direction: the United States should remain a global leader in the development of artificial intelligence. As Warren and others push related bills to accelerate in Congress, the debate surrounding "how to maintain national security while maintaining technological advantages and commercial competitiveness" is coming to the forefront in the AI and chip policy debate in Washington.