Today, I signed a coalition letter urging Speaker Johnson and Majority Leader Scalise to ensure that the FY2027 NDAA strengthens the American export control regime for advanced AI chips and semiconductor manufacturing equipment.
Dear Speaker Johnson and Majority Leader Scalise,
Dominance in the design and manufacture of advanced AI semiconductors is a national and economic security imperative for the United States and our allies. Allowing our adversaries to buy or access the very chips and tools they need to challenge that dominance is dangerous and shortsighted. Advanced compute offers enormous economic advantages we should not trade away. It is also critical to American intelligence, cyber-warfare capabilities, weapons systems, and military modernization.
Congress has taken important steps toward addressing critical vulnerabilities in the U.S. export control regime for advanced AI chips and semiconductor manufacturing equipment (SME). The AI OVERWATCH Act, MATCH Act, and Chip Security Act (CSA) have each passed the relevant House committees of jurisdiction by overwhelming bipartisan majorities. The manager’s amendment of the Senate NDAA is reported to include these urgently needed bills. We urge you to ensure the final FY2027 NDAA does as well.
As the Trump administration has asserted in its AI Action Plan: “Advanced AI compute is essential to the AI era, enabling both economic dynamism and novel military capabilities. Denying our foreign adversaries access to this resource, then, is a matter of both geostrategic competition and national security.” The leadership of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs, the House Select Committee on Intelligence, and the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party have all recognized the grave threat posed by exporting advanced AI chips and SME to China and other adversaries—and the vital role that existing export controls have played in expanding America’s AI lead.
But critical gaps remain in the advanced semiconductor and SME export control regime. Recent reporting indicates China trained its Kimi K3 model using restricted NVIDIA Blackwell chips, at least partly on Chinese soil, despite existing controls on selling such chips to China. The People’s Liberation Army (PLA) has continued to seek advanced American AI chips as a key element of its modernization strategy. The misalignment between American and allied controls on SME allows China to access the tools it needs to advance its domestic AI capabilities for both military and civilian use. Currently legal sales of advanced AI chips to China exacerbate serious supply constraints that limit American and allied AI capacity while strengthening China’s, even while the CCP orchestrates “sophisticated smuggling networks” to obtain restricted chips it cannot legally purchase.
Action is therefore needed.
- The AI OVERWATCH Act, which passed the House Foreign Affairs Committee by 42-2 on January 21, 2026, would codify existing restrictions on the sale of the most advanced chips, while strengthening protections regarding the sale of other advanced chips by requiring that such sales not benefit adversaries’ military capabilities or harm American supply or computational capacity.
- The Chip Security Act, which passed the House Foreign Affairs Committee unanimously 42-0 on March 26, 2026, would strengthen America’s ability to fight chip smuggling by requiring location verification technology for advanced AI chips.
- The MATCH Act, which passed the House Foreign Affairs Committee by 36-8 on April 22, 2026, and a stronger version of which is included in the Senate NDAA manager’s amendment, would mitigate existing loopholes by requiring alignment between American and allied export control regimes on critical SME technologies.
The American export control regime for advanced AI chips and SME has delivered extraordinary benefits to our nation, but it will achieve less than it could, and may prove entirely inadequate, unless it is strengthened to combat the CCP’s efforts to undermine it. We urge you to join your Senate colleagues, House committee leadership, and the wider conservative coalition in ensuring that the FY2027 NDAA does exactly that.
Sincerely,
Chris Griswold
Policy Director
American Comppass
Samuel Hammond
AI Policy Director
Foundation for American Innovation
Steve Chartan
Executive Vice President
Heritage Action
