A group of senators is urging President Donald Trump to preserve the US’s edge in AI development by denying China access to its most advanced chips and models. The bipartisan resolution, submitted by Sens. Chris Coons (D-DE) and Tom Cotton (R-AR), comes just days after Trump walked back a statement that suggested he would consider allowing Nvidia to sell its powerful Blackwell chip in China.
The resolution, which is cosponsored by Sens. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) and Dave McCormick (R-PA), brings attention to China’s “efforts to close the AI gap and leap ahead” of the US when it comes to developing and deploying frontier AI models. It adds that China’s “inability to make and access computing power is the main impediment to its progress.” To keep the US in the lead, the senators call on the government to urge US companies to continue offering “priority access” to its most advanced AI chips, cloud infrastructure, and models to allies, while preventing China and other adversaries from obtaining the technology.
“We cannot allow China to leap ahead of us and bolster their weapons capabilities, maximize their cyberattacks against American industry, and threaten long-term U.S. economic and national security,” Senator Coons says in a statement. “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.”
The Senators want the government to continue enforcing export controls that prevent US chipmakers like Nvidia from selling their most advanced chips to China, a policy put at risk last month when Trump said he would talk to Chinese President Xi Jinping about selling Nvidia’s Blackwell chip in the country.
In an interview with The Financial Times this week, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang admitted that “China is going to win the AI race,” citing lower energy costs and fewer regulations. He later followed up with an additional statement, saying China is just “nanoseconds behind America in AI.” Earlier this year, Chinese AI startup DeepSeek sent shivers through the industry with the launch of cost-efficient AI models that perform similarly to data-hungry rivals from companies like OpenAI.
Trump has since struck a deal with Nvidia and AMD that will require the companies to pay the government a 15 percent commission on the stripped-down chips they sell to China.
