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

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."

Loopholes and Enforcement

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.

Strategic Importance

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.

Community Reactions

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

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!"

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.

The administration can't even win a war against algae.

Username checks out.

Didn't you hear? Antifas/Dumocrats/Wokeists are dumping the algae in the pool during the night and tearing up the perfect paint job to make Trump look bad. (I wish this was something I made up)

Attempting to Prevent China...

...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.

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

The same cold war ideas as ever:

1. Find or make a boogey man enemy to scare the population
2. Profit

Everyone Is Missing the Point

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.

PRC leadership disagrees with you in the strongest possible way. By putting entire state apparatus' resources behind efforts to procure those chips.

It is far from perfect, but it is good enough for a lot of things.

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.

Regulatory Capture

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

AI Chip Is Also Your Video Card

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

The United States started restricting export of computers in 1949. When the G4 exceeded the performance limit to be classified as a munition 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

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

Dumb and dumber...

Drivers Licence

Closing the Barn Door After the Horses Left

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.

China Is Not an Adversary

The silly things that happened in the last decades is:

• Worked in Venezuela, did not work in Iran
• 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

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

Nah

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

And new cpu's have NPU cores... Which would qualify....

And Yet Americans

Because everyone knows location spoofing is and always will be impossible.