Warren, Hawley Call on Trump Administration to Quickly Address Export Control Failures Revealed by DeepSeek Breakthrough
“Multiple administrations have failed – at the behest of corporate interests – to update and enforce our export controls in a timely manner. We cannot let that continue.”
Washington, DC – United States Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), Ranking Member of the Senate Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs Committee and United States Senator Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) wrote to Commerce Secretary Nominee-Designate Howard Lutnick calling on the Trump Administration to strengthen export controls and close regulatory loopholes that are undercutting U.S. technology leadership against challenges from the People’s Republic of China (PRC). In their letter, Warren and Hawley laid out specific steps Mr. Lutnick should take, if confirmed, to strengthen export controls, including fortifying the AI diffusion rule, restricting H20 and equivalent chips, clamping down on chip smuggling, and adding Changxin Memory Technology (CXMT) to the Entity List.
“While many of the implications of the DeepSeek breakthrough remain unclear, one takeaway is beyond dispute: DeepSeek is an export control failure,” wrote Senator Warren and Hawley. DeepSeek should not have been able to acquire the restricted advanced AI chips it needed to train its model. But because the Commerce Department bowed to corporate lobbying and failed to close an export control loophole in a timely manner, PRC companies like DeepSeek were able to accumulate a large number of these chips.
Mr. Lutnick has expressed his intention to be “very strong” on our technology controls and has made clear we cannot settle for half-measures, lax enforcement, or loopholes that undermine our technology controls. He and President Trump must act immediately to put forward a strategy to protect our national security and to promote critical industries and technological development in the United States, not shaped by exceptions or other favors for well-connected corporate lobbyists. They can start by:
- Strengthening the AI Diffusion Rule: The rule, published in January, proactively addressed the range of diversionary tactics PRC companies could use to get around our controls, but Nvidia and other tech giants have come out against the rule and are urging the Trump Administration to weaken it or roll it back entirely.
- Restricting the H20 and equivalent chips: Nvidia and other chipmakers continue to sell advanced AI chips for deploying already-trained AI models to the PRC, which are essential to the PRC’s AI ambitions
- Clamping down on chip smuggling: We must issue commonsense know-your-customer rules so companies in the United States are not doing business with cutout companies that can easily be identified as aliases of already-blacklisted PRC military companies.
- Adding Changxin Memory Technology (CXMT) to the Entity List: Domestic PRC chipmaker CXMT, with the help of U.S. companies, has made breakthroughs in advanced memory, which will allow it to produce high-bandwidth memory, which is a key component in advanced AI chips.
The senators called on Mr. Lutnick, if he is confirmed, to review the ways that DeepSeek procured advanced U.S. AI chips in spite of U.S. export controls and take necessary steps to close those loopholes.
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