The manager's amendment to the Senate National Defense Authorization Act will fold in the AI Overwatch Act, the MATCH Act and the Chip Security Act, Punchbowl News reported, citing multiple sources — a win for China hawks who have pushed the measures for months. The AI Overwatch Act would insert Congress into export-control decisions for AI chips bound for "countries of concern" like China, and the version in the amendment would shorten a ban on sales of advanced chips such as Nvidia's Blackwells to those countries from two years to 18 months. The MATCH Act aims to press U.S. allies to curb sales of chipmaking equipment to China, while the Chip Security Act would require companies to track their AI chips abroad to combat smuggling. Senators led by Jim Banks (R-Ind.) and Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) drove the push, though the broader NDAA remains uncertain after Democrats voted Tuesday against opening debate over the Iran war and the bill's cost.
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Under Secretary of Commerce for Industry and Security Jeffrey Kessler testified Tuesday before the House Foreign Affairs Committee and told lawmakers "very few" Nvidia H200 AI chips have been shipped to China, per The Hill and CNBC. Commerce authorized about 10 Chinese firms including Tencent and ByteDance to buy the H200 earlier this year while keeping Nvidia's more advanced Blackwell line barred from China, and Kessler's remarks confirm those shipments have begun. He also told the committee additional regulation of AI chips and semiconductors is coming, and said the administration will not replace the Biden era AI diffusion rule that capped global AI chip shipments, per Reuters.
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Commerce's rule removing license requirements for advanced computing exports to the UAE government and approved firms took formal effect this week. G42, the Abu Dhabi AI conglomerate at the center of the rule, plans to become a U.S. company, according to the Wall Street Journal, which framed the eased access as reward for Abu Dhabi's cooperation in the U.S. campaign against Iran. The rule moves the UAE into a country grouping that permits license free purchases of Nvidia AI chips, some commercial satellites and defense equipment, and dual-use civil nuclear items alongside NATO members, per Semafor. The UAE is the only country in the grouping that is not a member of a multilateral export control regime.
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Twenty-six Meta employees filed suit in federal court in Oakland, California late Monday, alleging Meta used internal AI systems, keystroke and activity monitoring data, AI token usage dashboards and algorithmically assisted performance rankings to select workers for layoffs, per AP. Each plaintiff took protected medical or parental leave or requested a disability accommodation, and all remain employed by Meta with separations scheduled to begin July 22. The complaint cites the Family and Medical Leave Act, the Americans with Disabilities Act, the Pregnancy Discrimination Act and Title VII disparate impact doctrine. The Trump administration has ordered federal agencies to deprioritize disparate impact enforcement, per the Washington Post. Meta said in a statement that the claims "lack merit and are not based on facts" and that workforce decisions "were and are made by people, not AI."
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Seven current OpenAI employees and one former staffer have given more than $215,000 to Guardrails Alliance, a super PAC seeking stricter regulation of frontier AI labs, WIRED reported. The group launched last month with $5 million and casts itself as a populist counterweight to Leading the Future, the pro-AI industry PAC backed by more than $100 million from tech figures including OpenAI president and co-founder Greg Brockman. Research engineer Juan Felipe Cerón Uribe accounted for most of the total with a $200,000 donation, saying he wanted private companies held accountable for responsible AI development. The contributions are dwarfed by the $50 million Brockman and his wife, Anna, have pledged to Leading the Future, but they underscore growing internal tension at OpenAI over the company's ties to the group. Guardrails Alliance, which aims to raise $15 million this cycle, is expected to name more donors in a public campaign-finance filing Wednesday.
Read at WIRED ↗
The Trump administration launched Gold Eagle, an AI cybersecurity clearinghouse to help federal agencies, critical infrastructure operators and AI companies identify and patch software vulnerabilities discovered by advanced AI models, POLITICO reported. Unveiled Tuesday, it fulfills a requirement of Trump's June 2 executive order on AI security and will use leading models, including Anthropic's Mythos. National Cyber Director Sean Cairncross thanked open-source AI developers for their work on the effort.
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