Donald Trump’s decision to reverse course on selling advanced AI chips to China apparently has raised national security alarms, at least for some of the top Democrats in the Senate. In a letter to POTUS, top Senate Democrats warned about the recent chip deals with China and its implications for US national security.
As reported by CNBC, the letter is signed by Senators Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., and Mark Warner, D-Va.; Jack Reed, D-R.I.; Jeanne Shaheen, D-N.H.; Christopher Coons, D-Del.; and Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass.
“Our national security and military readiness relies upon American innovators inventing and producing the best technology in the world, and in maintaining that qualitative advantage in sensitive domains.” the letter says. “The United States has historically been successful in maintaining and building that advantage because of, in part, our ability to deny adversaries access to those technologies.”
The signatories warned that allowing the sale of AI chips to China while collecting “a commission on the sale of AI-enabling technology to our main global competitor” amounts to bargaining away America’s competitive edge and “is cause for serious alarm.”
Top Senate Democrats have also warned that selling AI chips to China could enhance its military capabilities, given that the Chinese military has previously shown interest in purchasing AI chips from NVIDIA.
In a statement to CNBC, an Nvidia spokesperson said selling AI chips would not reinforce anyone’s military capabilities, but it “would have helped America attract the support of developers worldwide and win the AI race.”
The Trump administration has recently authorized the sale of Nvidia’s H20 and AMD’s MI308 AI chips to China, on the condition that 15 percent of the revenues from these sales in the Chinese market go to the U.S. government.
The White House, however, has not left the Democrats’ letter unanswered. White House spokesman Kush Desai said, “It’s quite rich to see Democrats and irrelevant ‘experts’, who were totally MIA when Joe Biden’s autopen administration let H20 chips and other advanced technologies freely flow to China, now pretend to care about our national and economic security.”
Although the U.S. has lifted export restrictions on chip sales to China, Chinese regulators have recently cautioned domestic firms against buying chips from Nvidia and AMD, citing concerns that these products may contain embedded backdoors.