Rep. Foster's Bill for AI Chip Tracking

Representative Bill Foster (D-IL) plans to introduce legislation requiring U.S. regulators to implement technical measures for tracking the location of advanced artificial intelligence (AI) chips, such as those manufactured by Nvidia, and to prevent their unauthorized use under export control laws.

The initiative responds to growing evidence of widespread smuggling of U.S.-restricted chips into China, circumventing export bans imposed under both the Biden and Trump administrations. These high-performance chips are essential to developing advanced AI systems, including generative models and potentially dual-use applications in bioweapons and autonomous weapon systems.

“This is not an imaginary future problem,” Foster, a former physicist and chip designer, told Reuters. “It is a problem now, and at some point we’re going to discover that the Chinese Communist Party, or their military, is busy designing weapons using large arrays of chips.”

Foster’s legislation would direct the U.S. Department of Commerce to propose rules within six months addressing two areas:

1. Location Verification: Chips would be required to report their physical location using latency-based communication with secure servers, effectively geofencing operation under export license parameters.
2. Operational Control: Chips lacking proper authorization would be disabled from booting or functioning—effectively enforcing license compliance at the hardware level.

Support for the measure is bipartisan. Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi (D-IL), ranking member of the House Select Committee on China, called on-chip location verification “one creative solution we should explore.” Committee Chair Rep. John Moolenaar (R-MI) concurred, stating, “The Select Committee has strong bipartisan support for requiring companies like Nvidia to build location-tracking into their high-powered AI chips.”

Technical experts cited by Reuters confirm that the foundational technology already exists. Nvidia’s chips contain on-chip telemetry capabilities, and firms like Google reportedly use similar systems internally to monitor AI chip deployment across data centers. Tim Fist of the Institute for Progress explained that the proposed system would provide country-level location data — a significant improvement over current enforcement capabilities at the Bureau of Industry and Security (BIS), which currently lacks visibility into post-sale chip destinations.

“BIS has no idea which chips they should be targeting,” said Fist. “With location verification, they now at least have bucketed the set of chips that are out there in the world into ones that are very likely to not have been smuggled and ones that warrant further investigation.”

The legislation arrives amid increasing scrutiny of China-based firms like DeepSeek, whose AI systems reportedly rely on restricted Nvidia chips. Prosecutors in Singapore recently charged three Chinese nationals with fraud linked to servers potentially containing smuggled chips.

Foster acknowledged that the boot-up restriction element of his proposal is technically more complex but emphasized the need for proactive engagement. “We’ve gotten enough input that I think now we can have more detailed discussions with the actual chip and module providers to say, ‘How would you actually implement this?’”

Comparison: Foster Proposal vs. BIS Current Capabilities