Two members of Congress are urging President Donald Trump to consider imposing a cap on the export of Nvidia’s AI chips, citing the heavy reliance of the Chinese AI firm DeepSeek on these technologies.
In a report by Reuters, the two lawmakers are not exactly coming from the same side of the fence. They are Republican John Moolenaar and Democrat Raja Krishnamoorthi. Both lead the Select Committee on China of the House of Representatives.
Moolenaar and Krishnamoorthi touted the move to curbing the export of Nvidia chips as part of the Commerce and State Department-led review, which was ordered by the president to go over the export control system of the U.S. citing “developments involving strategic adversaries” as grounds for the move.
The two lawmakers wrote a letter on Wednesday to Michael Waltz, the National Security Advisor, underscoring the benefits of a possible curb in Nvidia exports.
“We ask that as part of this review, you consider the potential national security benefits of placing an export control on Nvidia’s H20 and chips of similar sophistication,” they stated in the letter as reported by Reuters.
On Thursday, in another letter released, they also alleged that DeepSeek recently launched a very sophisticated AI model, which extensively used the H20 chip of Nvidia. Sad to say, the chip is already not within the scope of the export control in place.
The recent letter by the lawmakers only showed the increasing concern about the advances made by China in AI after DeepSeek announced that its free AI assistant, which was only launched last week only utilizes data at a mere fraction of the cost of other AI models. With the announcement, it presents the possibility of only a lower investment on AI, Firstpost reported.
On Thursday, Axios reported that a separate notice was issued by the U.S. House of Representatives’ Chief Administrative Officer to congressional offices not to utilize DeepSeek.
“At this time, DeepSeek is under review by the CAO and is currently unauthorized for official House use,” the notice stated.
There is a fear in the U.S. that China would be able to harness AI technology to develop bioweapons or launch cyber-attacks. This fear has led the previous administration under former president Joe Biden to initiate measures that would curb access of China to important AI chips.
