Who wins the global race for artificial intelligence will determine whether this century is defined by American freedom or Chinese tyranny.
Beijing is pursuing technological supremacy with extraordinary aggression and speed, weaponizing AI to project power abroad and maintain iron-fisted control at home. In this contest, AI chips are the stealth fighters and hypersonic missiles of a new era in warfare. Advanced processors such as Nvidia’s H200 determine who can train the most capable models, process the most data, and deploy the most lethal AI-driven weaponry.
And yet the White House is finalizing details for its approval of the sale of these chips to China. These processors will not be powering video games. They will be powering autonomous drones, robotic reconnaissance units, AI-guided targeting systems, and immersive combat simulations — all aimed at advancing the global ambitions of the Chinese Communist Party.
Congress must draw the line by passing legislation proposed by House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Brian Mast (R-FL) to treat these chips as arms transfers, subject to congressional review and veto. Senators recently cleared a similar proposal, the GAIN AI Act, in their chamber through the National Defense Authorization Act. While early reports suggest that the effort is running into a wall on the House side, there is still time for House members to move swiftly to ensure national security decisions are made not by corporate interests, but by the elected representatives of the people.
Nvidia has made it painfully clear that it cannot be trusted to self-regulate in matters of national security. CEO Jensen Huang has openly dismissed concerns about China, mocking the “China hawk” label as a “badge of shame” and accusing those who support export restrictions of being “not patriotic, not even a little bit.” If recognizing that the CCP is the top strategic threat to the United States now qualifies as unpatriotic, then the vast majority of Americans will wear that badge with pride.
Every serious defense analyst acknowledges that the future of warfare will be built atop AI infrastructure. China’s military is already experimenting with AI-enabled robot dogs that scout in packs and drone swarms that autonomously hunt targets. These innovations require the exact sort of high-performance processors Nvidia seeks to ship to Beijing.
Without U.S. assistance, it would be years before China is capable of making a chip as powerful as the H200. Washington is therefore on the brink of handing President Xi Jinping a shortcut around his nation’s technological bottlenecks, granting China a massive leap forward simply because one American corporation values quarterly revenue over national security. Such a reckless self-inflicted error could haunt America for generations.
Free markets are essential to American vitality, but they do not operate in a geopolitical void. The government’s obligation, at a minimum, is to ensure that short-term commercial gain does not imperil long-term national survival. During the Cold War, we did not sell advanced radar systems to the Soviet Union. We did not export nuclear technology to Warsaw Pact nations. And we should not now export AI-warfare infrastructure to Communist China.
Mast’s version of the GAIN AI Act applies a time-tested principle to a transformative technology: If a product will demonstrably enhance an adversary’s military capabilities, Congress must have the authority to stop the sale. The bill ensures that Congress can exercise its constitutional oversight responsibilities by blocking proposed sales within a 30-day veto window.
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President Donald Trump’s initial instincts were correct when he restricted these exports. But recent efforts to loosen those controls in pursuit of a quick windfall blurred that clarity. Congress must now restore it.
We cannot afford to be naive about China’s intentions. Xi’s regime seeks nothing less than technological superiority and the geopolitical dominance that will surely follow. America must not enable that ambition. Congress should pass these commonsense safeguards with urgency and overwhelming bipartisan resolve. The security of the U.S. and the peace of the world may well depend on it.
John Shelton is the policy director at Advancing American Freedom, the conservative advocacy group founded by former Vice President Mike Pence.
