US Should Make Better Use of Chip Export Control Authorities, House Panel Hears
The U.S. executive branch has “really good authorities” to restrict exports of advanced computing chips but should improve how it wields them to prevent China from exploiting loopholes, a technology policy researcher told a congressional panel April 8.
Sign up for a free preview to unlock the rest of this article
Export Compliance Daily combines U.S. export control news, foreign border import regulation and policy developments into a single daily information service that reliably informs its trade professional readers about important current issues affecting their operations.
If U.S. officials “want to put in place export controls, they generally have legal means to do it,” said Gregory Allen, director of the Wadhwani AI Center at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. But he believes China often gets too much time to adjust to new restrictions.
Under the current approach, “there’s an inter-agency debate, and the debate is should we have a surprise attack or should we have no attack, and then they compromise on attack without the surprise, which is the worst of all the choices you could have made. And we make that choice again and again and again," Allen testified during a House Science, Space and Technology subcommittee hearing on China’s recent advances in artificial intelligence.
For example, while the administration unveiled new export controls on high-bandwidth memory chips in December (see 2412020016), it “telegraphed” the restrictions in July, giving China’s Huawei time to amass a “multi-year stockpile” of those chips, Allen said.
In another example, export controls implemented in October 2022 barred the sale of Nvidia H100 chips to China (see 2302020034), but the government failed to anticipate that Nvidia could quickly develop the slightly less capable H800 variant that was legal for export, Allen said. It wasn’t until October 2023 that the government updated its controls to reflect this development (see 2310170055), which gave China time to buy large numbers of H800s before they were restricted.
Allen reiterated his view that the Bureau of Industry and Security needs more money to implement export controls (see 2503110019). “This agency’s budget has gone down in inflated-adjusted terms since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine [and] since [the rollout of] these Chinese export controls,” he said. “Their job has gotten massively harder and the resources to support them have dwindled. I believe there’s no more powerful return on investment opportunity available anywhere in U.S. national security than strengthening our export controls enforcement and administration capacity.”
Rep. Zoe Lofgren, D-Calif., said she’s concerned the U.S. is not working enough with allies on export controls. “If we impose export controls with [the] U.S. only and international companies have the capacity to sell to China the equivalent, we haven’t really achieved what we’re trying to do,” she said.
Allen said the Biden administration aggressively pursued multilateral controls, but such an approach is time-consuming. On the other hand, while the U.S. could use its foreign direct product rule to restrict foreign chip-making tools that contain American parts, such a unilateral approach would be “incredibly imposing upon our allies" and could lead them to develop substitutes for the U.S. parts, he testified.