US plans to add ‘kill switch’ to Nvidia AI chips to slow China’s AI Progress

The U.S. crackdown on AI chip exports hasn’t worked as planned, and now lawmakers want to try something far more aggressive: a built-in “kill switch” in NVIDIA’s chips to cut off unauthorized use in China.

The latest effort comes after years of export controls that failed to block China’s access to advanced chips. Despite restrictions, companies like Huawei have bounced back with domestic alternatives, and Chinese firms have kept their pipelines alive through trade loopholes. Now, the U.S. wants more control—not just over where chips go, but how they’re used.

“A U.S. lawmaker plans to introduce legislation in coming weeks to verify the location of artificial-intelligence chips like those made by Nvidia after they are sold,” Reuters reported.

The report comes just a month after the Trump administration issued new rules requiring NVIDIA to secure licenses for shipping its H20 chip to China. The H20 was built for the Chinese market, but those plans are now frozen. Companies like Baidu, Tencent, and ByteDance are scrambling to adjust, while Huawei is stepping in to fill the void.

Washington’s been trying to stall China’s tech rise for five years. Huawei was hit hard—nearly driven to collapse—before bouncing back with the Mate 60 Pro, powered by a homegrown 5G chip from SMIC, China’s top chipmaker. That move caught U.S. regulators off guard and cast serious doubt on the effectiveness of existing sanctions.

US Export Controls Failed—Now Lawmakers Want to Lock Down NVIDIA AI Chips with Kill Switch to Block China’s Access

Now, U.S. Representative Bill Foster, a Democrat from Illinois and a trained particle physicist, says it’s time to go further. He is preparing legislation that could change how AI chips are regulated after they leave U.S. soil. The upcoming bill would require that AI chips, particularly those from NVIDIA, include embedded tracking tech.

“This is not an imaginary future problem. It is a problem now,” Foster told Reuters. “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, or even just working on (artificial general intelligence), which is as immediate as nuclear technology.”

Foster’s proposal doesn’t stop at tracking. His bill will give U.S. authorities the power to remotely shut down the chips being used without proper licenses, by rendering them inoperable. A “kill switch,” in other words. According to him, the tech to do this already exists.

It’s a bold move, but not entirely out of character given how U.S. policy on AI and chip exports has shifted. NVIDIA, for its part, says it can’t trace where all its chips end up, especially since Chinese firms are still getting them through secondary markets and hard-to-detect workarounds.

The push is gaining traction. Lawmakers on both sides of the aisle are backing the idea, with support coming from House Select Committee on China members, including Democrat Raja Krishnamoorthi and Republican John Moolenaar. While the bill hasn’t been introduced yet, Foster expects to move forward within weeks.

Foster’s bill aims to address what many see as a glaring weakness: once AI chips are exported, no one knows where they go. NVIDIA has openly admitted that it can’t track the chips after they’re sold. Yet technical experts—and Foster—say the capability is already there. In fact, much of the tracking tech is already embedded in NVIDIA chips, just not activated or enforced.

Google already uses similar tracking methods for its in-house AI chips, according to sources familiar with its operations. Their chips ping secured servers, and the delay in response helps pinpoint the general geographic location. The method relies on the known speed of light to measure the time it takes a chip to communicate with a server.

Tim Fist, former engineer and director at the Institute for Progress, believes this would give U.S. regulators a far better handle on export enforcement.

“BIS has no idea which chips they should be targeting as a potential high priority to investigate once they’ve gone overseas,” Fist told Reuters. “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 not to have been smuggled and ones that warrant further investigation.”

The second part of Foster’s plan is more aggressive: AI chips that can’t boot up unless they’re operating under a valid U.S. export license. Think of it as a software-level kill switch. Technically more difficult to implement, but the idea is no longer off the table.

This comes at a time when chip smuggling is back in the spotlight. Investigations have uncovered large-scale violations, including a recent case in Singapore where three people—one a Chinese national—were charged for fraud involving servers believed to be running banned NVIDIA chips.

DeepSeek, a Chinese AI firm that built models using restricted chips, has further raised alarm bells in Washington. The company’s systems reportedly rivaled U.S. offerings, despite the chips being off-limits.

In the last fiscal year ending January 26, China accounted for $17 billion of NVIDIA’s revenue, or about 13% of its total. That includes sales to Hong Kong. But according to reports from Reuters and others, many chips banned under export rules have continued to flow into the country, often through unauthorized resellers and shell companies.

Foster’s legislation would give the Commerce Department six months to finalize tracking requirements. While bipartisan support is building, the exact implementation, especially for chip shutdown mechanisms, will require detailed coordination with manufacturers like NVIDIA.

NVIDIA declined to comment on the proposed legislation.

Still, it’s clear that the U.S. is done playing defense. Location tracking and kill switches may be the next tools in Washington’s effort to stop China from running AI systems with American-made brains.

With AI now viewed as a national security issue, the push for stronger export enforcement is intensifying. And in the current political climate, where anything seems possible, a kill switch proposal feels less far-fetched than it once might have.

The original chip curbs date back to 2022, aimed at cutting off China from tech that could fuel military development. Pressure’s been mounting ever since. In February, former President Trump proposed slapping a 25% tariff on semiconductors and related imports.

Still, for all the efforts to isolate China, it remains a massive customer. NVIDIA reported $17.11 billion in revenue from the region—including Hong Kong—during fiscal 2025.