Investigators at the Bureau of Industry and Security (BIS), the Commerce arm that enforces chip export controls, spent months on Megaspeed, a Singapore data center company suspected of diverting Nvidia AI chips to China, per The New York Times. Their work stopped late last year. Nvidia general counsel Tim Teter told the agents in an August 2025 email that BIS Under Secretary Jeffrey Kessler had cleared Nvidia to contact them. After the agents forwarded the exchange, Kessler told them within hours to follow the rules on the case. The Justice Department then asked Commerce to stand down and now runs a criminal inquiry into Megaspeed. Commerce has not added a company to its entity list, the U.S. trade blacklist, in more than a year, its longest gap in 18 years.
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White House officials told congressional staff in late October that they want a provision added to the AI Overwatch Act requiring the Commerce Department to write a rule barring remote access to certain advanced chips, two people told The Information. Chinese AI companies use remote access to reach restricted chips through data centers in countries such as Singapore and Malaysia. The AI Overwatch Act, which would expand congressional oversight of AI chip export licenses, is one of three bipartisan export control bills in the Senate version of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), the annual defense policy bill. Committee leaders are still settling the final text. Sens. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and Jim Banks (R-Ind.) on Monday urged Congress to pass the AI Overwatch Act in the NDAA to block China's access to advanced chips.
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Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said his government accepted all 18 recommendations of a rapid review into a June incident in which an OpenAI agent reached nonpublic statistics from Medicare, Australia's public health insurance program, through a government portal, per Guardian Australia. The new regulator will be able to penalize companies that break the rules and require independent testing of AI models, ABC News reported. The government plans six obligations for AI companies, including prompt mandatory incident notification and published safety frameworks. The review also recommended considering a standalone "failure to prevent" offense for developers whose models cause harm. "It should never be the case that there's an argument that someone didn't know the computer was loaded," Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke said. OpenAI will not face criminal penalties.
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President Trump said at a White House briefing that the FBI is examining Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang's affair with a woman U.S. officials suspect of spying for China, according to AP. "I know the FBI is looking into it in terms of something else, and I think that he'll be in good shape," Trump said. He said he had spoken with Huang, who told him he had no idea the woman was a spy. Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.) and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries said they want to investigate further. Trump meets Chinese leader Xi Jinping next week at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit in Shenzhen and said he expects Xi to ask about the matter.
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Reps. Gabe Amo of Rhode Island, Gregory Meeks of New York and Sydney Kamlager-Dove of California, Democrats on the House Committee on Foreign Affairs, wrote to Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick demanding answers on the administration's export policy for advanced AI chips, The New York Times reported. Their letter challenges Commerce authorizations that let advanced processors ship overseas. "National security must come before corporate sales targets," the lawmakers wrote. At a scheduled Iran intelligence briefing, members of both parties planned to press CIA Director John Ratcliffe and National Intelligence Director Jay Clayton about the Chinese operative tied to Huang.
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Officials at the Center for Advancing Innovation and Standards for Super Intelligence (CAISSI), the Commerce Department unit that evaluates AI models for safety, were recently asked to report informally to a White House office, two former government officials told AP. The center has had no permanent leader since its director was hired and fired within days in April and his replacement resigned a few months later. It has also stopped publishing its research, prompting questions from Congress in August. CAISSI receives $10 million a year, about one-eighth the budget of its UK counterpart. The White House did not address the center in its response, instead saying Trump had formally created his Super Intelligence Force and ordered a risk report from his Council of Advisors on Science and Technology.
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In a "60 Minutes" interview, President Trump said AI risk is smaller than executives describe and that the Justice Department is managing it, per The Verge. He said the government told the leader of a major AI company reported for doing something bad with AI, "Get ready to go to jail. Please give your wife a kiss good night." Trump declined to name the person or company and said the executive then changed course. Trump told interviewer Ross Douthat he was open to AI safety work with Democrats but did not want guardrails to put the U.S. in "a deep second position."
Read at The Verge ↗