Senate measure would support limits on AI chip sales to China

Allison Mollenkamp, CQ-Roll Call on Nov 6, 2025

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WASHINGTON — Senators on both sides of the aisle on Thursday signed onto a call to keep advanced artificial intelligence chips from being sold to China.

Sen. Chris Coons, D-Del., unveiled an as-yet unnumbered resolution focused on the importance of maintaining U.S. “primacy in artificial intelligence” and on restricting access to the chips required to build so-called frontier AI models.

The resolution, which Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., co-sponsored, comes days after President Donald Trump said in an interview on CBS’ “60 Minutes” that he would not allow China to buy the most advanced chips from Nvidia, which he called the “prime” manufacturer of such chips. Sens. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., and Dave McCormick, R-Pa., also co-sponsored the resolution, according to a statement issued by Coons.

Trump had previously said he was considering allowing the sale of the chips, which Coons called a “tragic mistake” in an interview with CNN.

Coons said in the statement that U.S. “prosperity and safety rests on our ability to win the AI race.”

“This bipartisan resolution sets us on a path toward a different future — one in which frontier AI systems are built in the United States by American companies, and one in which our nation is stronger and safer because our innovators, businesses, and military have everything they need to prevail in the fight for dominant technology of the rest of the 21st century,” Coons said.

Cotton, in the same statement, added that “We must do everything to protect American AI dominance from adversaries like Communist China.”

The resolution said that “preserving American dominance in AI will allow the United States to hold an advantage in military capabilities, economic might, scientific achievement, and geopolitical influence, all of which will enable the United States to shape the world’s future on a foundation of democratic values.”

It also commended similar arguments from the White House in Trump’s AI Action Plan, which the resolution quoted as saying, ‘‘denying our foreign adversaries access to this resource, then, is a matter of both geostrategic competition and national security.”

The resolution highlights the gap in chip production between U.S. companies, partnered with manufacturers in Taiwan, and Chinese manufacturing.

“China — despite more than a decade of major Chinese indigenization efforts and more than $200,000,000,000 in investments since 2014 — has struggled to produce advanced AI chips and therefore has to rely on smuggling or legal exports of advanced chips from the United States,” the resolution said.

Cotton sent a letter last week to Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, calling on the department to work with the Malaysian government and American companies to “address smuggling of export-controlled U.S. chips through Malaysia, a high-risk transshipment point for illegal chip diversion. Chip diversion undermines American AI leadership and propels the growth of China’s domestic AI industry.”

The letter suggested that the U.S. could provide “guidance, recommended best practices, and information sharing, where appropriate, to help Malaysian officials build a robust foreign direct investment (FDI) and beneficial ownership information (BOI) screening program,” especially for the country’s growing data center industry.

It also suggested that the U.S. could provide priority customs clearance for AI chips with anti-diversion mechanisms.

The Senate-passed fiscal 2026 defense authorization bill includes a provision that would require companies selling AI chips to give first-refusal rights to American buyers before selling the chips to entities in foreign countries of concern.

Nvidia opposed that provision, with a spokesperson saying in a statement that the provision was trying to “solve a problem that does not exist.”

The House-passed NDAA does not include a similar provision, leaving the ultimate fate of the language to bicameral negotiations over the final bill.