In recent weeks, one question has occupied the minds of China-watchers and artificial intelligence insiders alike: Would the White House let Nvidia sell its most advanced Blackwell chips to China?
We finally have an answer. “The most advanced [chips], we will not let anybody have them other than the United States,” said President Trump on Sunday in an interview with 60 Minutes. The clarification comes on the heels of a one‑year “trade truce” announced on November 1, under which Beijing agreed to suspend a raft of retaliations (including restrictions of rare earths) in exchange for Washington easing up on tariffs. Any concession on the export of cutting‑edge AI hardware was notably absent.
This is great news if you believe, as I do, that frontier AI systems are on the cusp of truly transformative capabilities. With the length of tasks AI can perform now doubling every 4–7 months, the same chips that are today used to host chatbots and generate funny videos will, in a year hence, be running armies of autonomous AI engineers and scientists that work day and night. Technological discovery and productivity growth stand to accelerate massively, along with the power of autonomous cyber-weapons and other capabilities we ought not sell to our adversaries.
