Ranking Member Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) sent Under Secretary for Industry and Security Jeffrey Kessler a letter Thursday invoking the Export Control Reform Act of 2018 to compel the Bureau of Industry and Security, the Commerce arm that controls chip exports, to produce documents on export control loopholes she says BIS's own actions created. Warren says the Trump administration rescinded and stopped enforcing Biden's AI Diffusion Rule, stripping the underlying license requirement that made the January 2025 Foundry Due Diligence Rule effective. That could let foundries such as TSMC ship advanced AI chips to unvetted intermediaries in third countries, she wrote. "BIS has had every opportunity to fix this loophole and has yet to act," Warren wrote. She set an Aug. 6, 2026 deadline for BIS to produce the requested records.
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Sens. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) and Jim Banks (R-Ind.) and Reps. Bob Latta (R-Ohio) and George Whitesides (D-Calif.) introduced the Collaboration on Adversarial Threats and Security Risks Act on Thursday, per NBC News. The bill would let AI companies and industry groups share information on AI security risks in good faith and jointly delay or limit deployment of high-risk models with written notice, without running afoul of antitrust laws. It treats alleged Chinese AI copycats as a U.S. security threat and gives the Justice Department authority to seek an injunction against organizations that abuse the exemption. Sponsors likened the carve-out to the 2015 congressional exemption for cybersecurity information sharing. Latta, chair of the House Energy and Commerce subcommittee on energy, said AI models are now critical infrastructure alongside hospitals, water systems and the electric grid.
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Trump administration officials are split over whether to punish Moonshot AI over allegations it copied American models to build Kimi K3, POLITICO reported. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Office of Science and Technology Policy Director Michael Kratsios have pushed a hard line on intellectual property, while Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick has taken a more modest approach centered on companies' access to cheaper, effective technology. Kratsios said on X Wednesday that the administration had information indicating Moonshot distilled Anthropic's Fable model and had obtained restricted Nvidia GB300 servers, but he provided no evidence, and the claims drew skepticism from researchers, industry and people around the administration — including over whether a frontier model could be copied in a matter of days. The post was not coordinated with the Commerce Department, which controls the Entity List and has not started drafting plans to add Moonshot or other Chinese AI companies; Commerce's Center for AI Standards and Innovation and the UK AI Security Institute jointly evaluated the model and found it still trails U.S. systems while ranking as the strongest open-weight model. Bessent, who is expected to lead the next round of U.S.-China economic talks, wrote that "open source is not open season on American IP" and said sanctions and Entity List designations remain possible. Anthropic has welcomed tighter scrutiny of Chinese developers; nearly 200 startup founders urged the administration this week not to cut off access to Chinese open-weight models. Trump has not weighed in publicly.
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Chinese Vice Foreign Minister Ma Zhaoxu traveled to Washington this week to press U.S. officials, including Deputy Secretary of State Landau, on the scope, possible outcomes and agenda of the planned September AI talks so Beijing can decide which officials to send, Bloomberg reported. Beijing's priority list for the discussions includes access to Anthropic's Mythos model, how the U.S. plans to control the release of future frontier models, and whether Washington will impose restrictions on Chinese open weight AI models, analysts told Reuters. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent will lead the U.S. side, and the meeting is expected before Chinese President Xi Jinping's Sept. 24 U.S. visit. White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said Thursday that AI is a priority for the president and that the administration wants to ensure the U.S. continues to lead in the AI race.
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Reps. Lori Trahan (D-Mass.) and Jay Obernolte (R-Calif.) introduced the FRONTIER Act on Thursday, a national risk-based oversight framework carved out of their broader Great American AI Act discussion draft. Covered developers would have to publish model cards and transparency reports at deployment, maintain risk-management frameworks reviewed annually or within 30 days of any material change, report critical safety incidents within 24 hours of discovery, and submit to third-party independent audits. The Washington Examiner reported that coverage is limited to developers that have spent more than $1 billion on model development over the past three years; the bill would preempt state laws within the scope of its provisions. Original cosponsor Erin Houchin's (R-Ind.) statement pointed to an advanced AI system that "broke out of its own developer's testing environment" this week, referencing the OpenAI model that escaped containment and hacked Hugging Face without human direction.
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Michael Kratsios, director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, told Rep. Jay Obernolte (R-Calif.) at a House Science Committee hearing Wednesday that "CAISI can certainly benefit from more resources," giving administration cover to Obernolte's bipartisan bill (H.R. 9363) to codify the Commerce Department's AI safety body into law, per FedScoop. Obernolte said he believes the Center for AI Standards and Innovation likely needs "closer to $100 million a year"; the bill currently provides $20 million annually and CAISI received $10 million in fiscal 2026, the same as each of the prior two fiscal years. Kratsios said the office needs resources to recruit high-talent staff for temporary government tours to do frontier model testing and evaluation, work that pays far better in the private sector. The House Science panel unanimously advanced the codification bill last month as part of an AI package.
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