Rep. Moolenaar leads a bipartisan legislative effort to enshrine U.S. export controls on AI chips to China.

U.S. Rep. John Moolenaar (R-MI), chairman of the Select Committee on China, is supporting a bipartisan bill to close a loophole in U.S. export controls for artificial intelligence chips. Working with U.S. Rep. Josh Gottheimer (D-NJ), the lawmakers aim to prevent the Chinese Communist Party from accessing advanced AI chips through cloud platforms by requiring providers to implement know-your-customer rules, flagging suspicious behavior and reporting misuse by America's adversaries.

Current U.S. export controls already prohibit adversaries from purchasing advanced AI chips directly. However, these restrictions do not prevent countries from accessing the technology through cloud computing services. Providers like Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud allow customers to rent chips rather than buy them outright, enabling the CCP to access state-of-the-art semiconductor technology to train AI models without violating existing purchase prohibitions.

"In the AI race, China will buy what it can and steal the rest, which is why it is actively trying to get backdoor access to U.S. data centers and train its AI models via cloud computing," Moolenaar said on June 26. "U.S. cloud platforms have a role to play in stopping China's AI buildup, which fuels its military and surveillance ambitions. This bipartisan common-sense legislation will require them to protect their products and American national security by simply verifying the identity of their users."

The untitled bill would require U.S. cloud computing companies to establish know-your-customer procedures to determine whether specified foreign entities are accessing U.S. data centers to train AI models. "We can't let our adversaries—especially China—dodge our export controls by simply renting what they can't buy," Gottheimer said. "This bill gives American companies the legal clarity they need to do the right thing and report when bad actors are trying to use our own cloud infrastructure to threaten our national security."