Trump’s 3,800‑word letter, sent to the House Energy Committee on Thursday, called for immediate bans on exporting AI‑grade chips beyond the 7‑nm threshold and a crackdown on Southeast Asian smuggling routes.
While Amodei’s own missive, titled “We Must Pace the Frontier,” echoed the call to keep China at arm’s length, Trump’s administration has, for example, approved sales of Nvidia’s H200 GPUs to Chinese firms that the company has historically blocked.
The core challenge remains the dual‑use nature of rare‑earth imports. Trump and Xi agreed last year that China would secure a steady flow of critical minerals in exchange for a 25‑percent tariff cut on U.S. steel; the deal is set to be renewed next week during Xi’s White House visit.
Despite those concessions, China has poured $12 billion into AI startups such as DeepSeek and Moonshot, producing models that rival the U.S. at a fraction of the cost, a trend that threatens to erode the market share of Silicon Valley players.
The Biden‑era administration’s push to penalize Chinese firms that engage in “industrial‑scale” distillation of U.S. models will be tested when the U.S. and China meet on Sept. 24; White House officials say the talks will include a hard‑line stance on AI theft.