Key Republican urges US to block advanced chips to China

The United States’ most prominent congressional watchdog on China wants Washington to stop treating semiconductor export policy like a leaky faucet. Rep. John Moolenaar, the Michigan Republican who chairs the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party, is pushing the Commerce Department to implement significantly tighter export controls on advanced AI chips headed to China. The centerpiece of his proposal is something called a “rolling technical threshold,” or RTT. Rather than setting a fixed ceiling on what chips China can receive, the RTT would automatically adjust the bar based on what Chinese manufacturers can already produce domestically. The target is to keep China’s aggregate AI computing power at no more than 10% of total US AI compute capacity. What the proposals actually say By tying the threshold to China’s own production capabilities, the proposal tries to make the ceiling a moving target rather than a fixed line that China can eventually cross through its own manufacturing progress. On the Senate side, Senators Jim Banks of Indiana and Pete Ricketts of Nebraska are adding legislative muscle to the effort. Ricketts introduced the bipartisan SAFE Chips Act, wh...