US Rep. Amodei Advocates for Chip Ban to Counter China's AI Capabilities

In a blog post on Monday, Amodei called a chip ban “the most efficient and direct way” of preventing Beijing from building frontier AI models for military use and domestic surveillance, which he said was his primary concern. The US “should not sell powerful chips or chipmaking equipment to China” and must crack down on the “rampant smuggling and workarounds” used to bypass current sanctions, Amodei wrote. Amodei also took aim at distillation – a common industry practice where developers use the outputs of a more capable model to train or refine another system. He accused Chinese developers of leveraging large-scale distillation on American models to bypass hardware limitations, warning that it could shrink the gap between US and Chinese capabilities to just a few months. The debate comes amid growing speculation that Washington could introduce restrictions on open-weight models following rapid advances by its Chinese competitors, highlighted by the recent release of the Kimi K3 model by Moonshot AI.