NEW YORK, Jan 21 (Reuters) – Key Republican lawmakers on Wednesday scheduled a committee vote on a bill that would give Congress more power over the export of artificial intelligence chips, despite opposition from White House AI czar David Sachs and others.
Rep. Brian Mast (R-Florida), chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, introduced the AI Surveillance Act in December after President Donald Trump greenlighted shipments of Nvidia’s powerful H200 AI chip to China.
The bill would give the House Foreign Affairs Committee and the Senate Banking Committee 30 days to review and potentially block licenses issued for the export of advanced AI chips to China and other adversaries.
One source said the chances of passage of the bill had increased after a concerted media campaign against it last week.
At a hearing last week titled “Winning the AI Arms Race Against the Chinese Communist Party,” Mast said the bill would ensure “our most advanced AI chips are not used by the Chinese military.”
Mr. Sacks’ press secretary and the White House did not respond to requests for comment.
Last week, Sacks reposted a post from an X account called “Wall Street Mav” that claimed the bill was orchestrated by Never Trumpers and former staffers of Presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden and was designed to undermine President Trump’s authority and America First strategy. The post named Dario Amodei, CEO of AI company Anthropic, and claimed he had hired former Biden staffers to promote the issue.
“That’s right,” Sacks wrote.
An Anthropic spokesperson declined to comment on the allegations or the bill. But Amodei has been outspoken about blocking China from acquiring advanced chips like the H200.
“It would be a big mistake to ship these chips,” Amodei said Tuesday at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. “I think this is strange. It’s like selling nuclear weapons to North Korea.”
Conservative activist Laura Loomer and others also criticized the bill last week, calling it “an act of pro-Beijing obstructionism disguised as oversight.”
Mast rejected that criticism. “The President was very wise to block ASML from selling cutting-edge chip manufacturing tools to China while banning Nvidia Blackwell chips,” he wrote in response to Sachs’ comments. “If you want, advise him to sell the H200 chip to China. I would advise the opposite.”
Nvidia did not respond to a request for comment. So did the U.S. Department of Commerce, which oversees export controls.
If the bill does not pass out of committee, it must pass unanimously in both the House and Senate and then be signed by the president.
(Reporting by Karen Freifeld; Editing by Jamie Freed)
