Washington: The Trump administration’s decision to allow NVIDIA to export its advanced H200 artificial intelligence chips to China drew sharp and coordinated criticism on Capitol Hill, with senior lawmakers from both chambers warning that the move jeopardises US national security, undermines export-control policy, and strengthens Beijing’s technological capabilities at America’s expense.
Congressman Gregory Meeks, the Ranking Member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, said the decision shows that “under this administration, our national security is for sale.” Calling the move “a unilateral concession to China,” Meeks warned it would “accelerate China’s AI industry, giving away America’s technological edge to the very companies trying to evade US export controls.”
He added, “This decision reeks of corruption. NVIDIA’s CEO has directly lobbied the administration for months and is being rewarded over the objections of Trump’s own national security team. Export control decisions must be made based on national security, not solely on the whims of the president and the offer coming from the highest bidder.”
A group of senior Senate Democrats — including Brian Schatz, Chris Coons, Jeanne Shaheen, Jack Reed, Elizabeth Warren, Andy Kim, Michael Bennet, and Elissa Slotkin — released a joint statement calling the decision “a colossal economic and national security failure.”
“The H200S are vastly more capable than anything China can make and gifting them to Beijing would squander America’s primary advantage in the AI race,” the senators said. They emphasised that access to the chips “would give China’s military transformational technology to make its weapons more lethal, carry out more effective cyberattacks against American businesses and critical infrastructure, and strengthen their economic and manufacturing sector.”
The lawmakers cited Chinese AI company DeepSeek, noting that “as recently as last week”, it said the lack of access to advanced American-designed chips was its “single biggest impediment” to competing with US firms. “With this decision, President Trump is poised to remove that barrier,” they said.
Slotkin, who joined the Senate this year after serving in the House, issued a separate statement with several of the same senators, repeating that the administration’s action “would squander America’s primary advantage in the AI race” and warning that the president “must reverse course and recommit to preserving American dominance in AI.”
Senator Mark Warner, Vice Chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee and a key architect of the bipartisan CHIPS Act, said the administration’s move exposes a deeper strategic vacuum. He argued that the United States must “remain the undisputed leader in AI hardware,” but the White House had adopted “a haphazard and transactional approach to export policy” that “demonstrates that it does not have any sort of coherent strategy for how we will compete with China.”
Warner cautioned that without a long-term plan across “multiple key dimensions of AI innovation,” the administration “risks squandering US AI leadership and deferring to the People’s Republic of China up and down the AI stack.”
Indian American Congressman Raja Krishnamoorthi, Ranking Member of the House committee examining US–China strategic competition, said allowing exports of H200 chips “would be a profound national security mistake and a gift to our top strategic competitor.” He said advanced GPUs remain “one of the most important advantages we hold in the race for AI, military modernisation, and the jobs of the future.”
“Instead of opening the spigot for H200 sales to China, we should strengthen guardrails, build cutting-edge capacity here in the United States, and ensure that American workers and our national security — not the CCP — benefit from the future of AI,” he said.
(IANS)
