By Richard Vanderford
Nvidia chips should be hit with tighter U.S. export controls following revelations the company's technology was used by Chinese artificial intelligence startup DeepSeek, the bipartisan leaders of an influential congressional committee said.
President Trump's administration should consider putting export controls on Nvidia's H20 chip, which DeepSeek reportedly used extensively, along with blocks on chips of similar sophistication, said Rep. John Moolenaar (R., Mich.), chairman of the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party, and Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi (D., Ill.), the committee's ranking member.
The two also called for a potential crackdown on chip shipments to Singapore, saying the technology is apparently being diverted elsewhere. The lawmakers made the recommendations in a letter to National Security Adviser Michael Waltz that was made public Thursday. The White House didn't respond to a request for comment.
Blindsided
U.S. officials, tech gurus and stock markets were riled earlier this month by the public unveiling of DeepSeek's AI model R1, which the company says was made with relatively unsophisticated chips and at a fraction of the cost needed to build U.S. models.
President Biden's administration had put in place export controls on chip technology that were meant to prevent China from using AI to advance its military or surveillance capabilities.
'Ready to work with the administration'
Nvidia said its products comply with all government requirements. Under performance thresholds set by the Biden administration, chips with five-year-old designs -- technology currently available in gaming products -- were approved for export, the company said.
The company "is ready to work with the [new] administration as it pursues its own approach to AI," Nvidia said.
The development of DeepSeek's new model despite U.S. export controls doesn't mean the controls themselves are ineffective, as some have argued, but does mean that the U.S. should more frequently update them, Moolenaar and Krishnamoorthi said.
"Frequently updating export controls is imperative to ensure [China] will not exploit regulatory gaps and loopholes to advance their AI ambitions," they said.
DeepSeek made extensive use of Nvidia's H800 chip, which Nvidia designed to fall outside of U.S. export controls, they wrote, citing a DeepSeek technical report.
Other restrictions sought
The lawmakers also called for the administration to prohibit the federal government from acquiring AI systems based on Chinese models, except for research purposes, citing the possibility of more U.S. data flowing to China and possibly further enhancing the systems.
In another recommendation, the lawmakers noted that Singapore-bound Nvidia chips seem to be ultimately diverted to other countries and suggested that shipments should be curtailed unless the country is willing to crack down on transshipments to China.
OpenAI, one of DeepSeek's leading U.S. competitors, is probing whether DeepSeek might have used a technique called distillation to extract its data in a bid to catch up. Users have also noted that DeepSeek's answers to sensitive questions about China seem censored in line with Chinese state norms. When the system was asked about the 1989 massacre at Beijing's Tiananmen Square, for example, it said, "Let's talk about something else."
The Select Committee, a bipartisan grouping of some of the House of Representatives' most ardent China hawks, has been an influential advocate for a tougher approach on China and in some cases on U.S. companies that do business with the country. The committee, which was instrumental in the legislation that led to the TikTok ban, had previously urged a crackdown on older-generation chips.
Write to Richard Vanderford at Richard.Vanderford@wsj.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
January 30, 2025 17:40 ET (22:40 GMT)
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