> To help curb the issue, the country is turning to location verification. Last March, the U.S. House Foreign Affairs Committee passed a bill requiring location verification for advanced AI chips. Ahead of the U.S.-China summit in late September, legislators called for a floor vote on that and related bills.
The passed bill is the Chip Security Act. I wonder if the senate will wait until the midterm elects take office before holding a floor vote on the bill.
I also don't think it is particular hard to implement. Some sort of "need to call home to get today's code" mechanism has been around for ages and it is common in consumer hardware.
And it will allow a centralized authority to keep track and disable any rogue chip remotely - lots of people would like that.
On tge other had, isnt thus an "alignment" benefit? Pair this with the fingerprint scheme to track the model, people using nefarious models,naively, then have a xhance to leak theie location.
> requiring location verification for advanced AI chips
Does.... does anyone in Congress even bother to consult with tech experts anymore? Once the chip is in your competitors hands it's over. No amount of tracking/verification etc. will stop it.
> “If you can use a private key that exists on a particular chip, and you can sign a message with that cryptographic key, and then that message is received by a so-called landmark server, then you can send a couple of those messages and time those messages. A lot of modern chips come with trusted execution environments that support a hardware root of trust where you can sign these messages,” says Kristian Rönn, CEO and cofounder of Lucid Computing. “You get a radius of where the chip has to be.”
This is such a stupid idea. Whoever owns the network can just throttle these messages to be extremely slow, throwing off the data completely, or just not giving the cards network access at all. Just because you throw in "public-private key cryptography", "hardware root of trust", and "trusted execution environment" into your proposal doesn't make it sound.
In the case where the network is throttling the messages or not allowing network access at all, the chip's firmware can simply refuse to activate the chip.
Now, that's not to say that this can't be gamed at all. The HFT people know very well that free space radio links are faster than fiber. You could easily just make the datacenter operators put a starlink dish on the roof though, and you can't beat the speed of light.
Now there could be ambiguous situations, such as a country where their only internet connection comes through a banned country. In that case, again, force them to put a starlink on the roof.
You can also require random on-site inspections. In order to have 10,000 GPUs in a datacenter, you'd have to declare them to the government. Not only would they have to report their position regularly, but when the inspectors showed up where they were declared to be, the inspectors would have to find them there. If they didn't, the control organization would just deactivate them. There would be some phone home interval grace period, maybe a day or two, and after that, the GPUs would just stop working until they were re-verified.
> In the case where the network is throttling the messages or not allowing network access at all, the chip's firmware can simply refuse to activate the chip.
A dumb pinging chip has 0 ways to detect network throttling. Especially when it doesn't have admin rights to said network. Also MANY use cases for these GPUs require air-gapped environments to meet compliance requirements. This wouldn't work.
> You can also require random on-site inspections. In order to have 10,000 GPUs in a datacenter, you'd have to declare them to the government.
....So the companies in Shenzhen and Guangzhou need to declare them to the U.S. government or the Chinese government? Who's gonna deactivate them then? The issue being discussed in the article has nothing to do with companies that are within U.S. jurisdiction, it's about companies/individuals outside U.S. jurisdiction.
You can use the network sort of like a GPS. If you have two nodes that can ping each other in a certain time, you multiply that by the speed of light (in the appropriate medium), and that gives you an upper bound on the distance between those nodes. You can draw circles around each beacon node and where they intersect is the possible region that the chip could be living.
If packets are being consistently delayed, the circles get big and the possible region that the chip could be in gets big. If the chip can get a few fast pings in here and there it still works ok though.
It may not be possible to provide chips like this to a truly airgapped datacenter. You could have some special piece of hardware that proxies only the pings, but that is not a true airgap.
The companies in Shenzen and Guangzhou would declare with the U.S. government, or some international organization. Obviously the Chinese government doesn't have to let inspectors into their country, but if they don't, when the GPU goes to get it's cryptographic unlock code for the day, it's not going to arrive and the GPU won't work.
Nvidia Corp’s general counsel intervened in a US government probe of suspected smuggling of AI chips by Megaspeed International, questioning whether the Trump administration played a role in detaining an executive from the Singapore-based firm who’s now at the heart of a scandal threatening Jensen Huang.
In late summer 2025, Nvidia’s Tim Teter called Commerce Under Secretary Jeffrey Kessler, who oversees US chip export curbs, to ask about the Megaspeed investigation, according to people familiar with the matter.
Specifically, Teter wanted to know whether Kessler’s Bureau of Industry and Security was involved in the Singapore government’s recent detention of Alice Huang, a Megaspeed executive, according to the people. Singapore police had brought Alice in for questioning and restricted her from leaving the country. BIS was not involved in that action, said the people, who spoke on condition of anonymity owing to the sensitivity of the matter.
It doesn't take a Mensa-level IQ to figure out where chips are headed. A company in Singapore run by Chinese nationals, that had less than $6 million in cash at the end of 2023 and then buying over $4 billion in advanced chips between 2024 and 2026, isn't keeping them in Kalamazoo, Malaysia.
Most of the smuggling is a case of see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil.
or, and I'm just spitballing here, you could walk the actual walk about "free markets" as well as talk the talk, and let the chips fall where they may.
TIL that this technology exists.
This is interesting:
> To help curb the issue, the country is turning to location verification. Last March, the U.S. House Foreign Affairs Committee passed a bill requiring location verification for advanced AI chips. Ahead of the U.S.-China summit in late September, legislators called for a floor vote on that and related bills.
The passed bill is the Chip Security Act. I wonder if the senate will wait until the midterm elects take office before holding a floor vote on the bill.
[dead]
It looks there is a massive push for this atm and only one major player is against it (NVDIA).
Ultimately I think this will be very self-destructive for US tech supremacy. But we will see what happens.
I also don't think it is particular hard to implement. Some sort of "need to call home to get today's code" mechanism has been around for ages and it is common in consumer hardware.
And it will allow a centralized authority to keep track and disable any rogue chip remotely - lots of people would like that.
On tge other had, isnt thus an "alignment" benefit? Pair this with the fingerprint scheme to track the model, people using nefarious models,naively, then have a xhance to leak theie location.
That's not "Find My". "Find My" is for finding things that you own.
This is something else entirely, a control scheme that operates after the sale.
Define mine. This is US origin export controlled hardware of national security concern.
> requiring location verification for advanced AI chips
Does.... does anyone in Congress even bother to consult with tech experts anymore? Once the chip is in your competitors hands it's over. No amount of tracking/verification etc. will stop it.
> “If you can use a private key that exists on a particular chip, and you can sign a message with that cryptographic key, and then that message is received by a so-called landmark server, then you can send a couple of those messages and time those messages. A lot of modern chips come with trusted execution environments that support a hardware root of trust where you can sign these messages,” says Kristian Rönn, CEO and cofounder of Lucid Computing. “You get a radius of where the chip has to be.”
This is such a stupid idea. Whoever owns the network can just throttle these messages to be extremely slow, throwing off the data completely, or just not giving the cards network access at all. Just because you throw in "public-private key cryptography", "hardware root of trust", and "trusted execution environment" into your proposal doesn't make it sound.
In the case where the network is throttling the messages or not allowing network access at all, the chip's firmware can simply refuse to activate the chip.
Now, that's not to say that this can't be gamed at all. The HFT people know very well that free space radio links are faster than fiber. You could easily just make the datacenter operators put a starlink dish on the roof though, and you can't beat the speed of light.
Now there could be ambiguous situations, such as a country where their only internet connection comes through a banned country. In that case, again, force them to put a starlink on the roof.
You can also require random on-site inspections. In order to have 10,000 GPUs in a datacenter, you'd have to declare them to the government. Not only would they have to report their position regularly, but when the inspectors showed up where they were declared to be, the inspectors would have to find them there. If they didn't, the control organization would just deactivate them. There would be some phone home interval grace period, maybe a day or two, and after that, the GPUs would just stop working until they were re-verified.
> In the case where the network is throttling the messages or not allowing network access at all, the chip's firmware can simply refuse to activate the chip.
A dumb pinging chip has 0 ways to detect network throttling. Especially when it doesn't have admin rights to said network. Also MANY use cases for these GPUs require air-gapped environments to meet compliance requirements. This wouldn't work.
> You can also require random on-site inspections. In order to have 10,000 GPUs in a datacenter, you'd have to declare them to the government.
....So the companies in Shenzhen and Guangzhou need to declare them to the U.S. government or the Chinese government? Who's gonna deactivate them then? The issue being discussed in the article has nothing to do with companies that are within U.S. jurisdiction, it's about companies/individuals outside U.S. jurisdiction.
You can use the network sort of like a GPS. If you have two nodes that can ping each other in a certain time, you multiply that by the speed of light (in the appropriate medium), and that gives you an upper bound on the distance between those nodes. You can draw circles around each beacon node and where they intersect is the possible region that the chip could be living.
If packets are being consistently delayed, the circles get big and the possible region that the chip could be in gets big. If the chip can get a few fast pings in here and there it still works ok though.
It may not be possible to provide chips like this to a truly airgapped datacenter. You could have some special piece of hardware that proxies only the pings, but that is not a true airgap.
The companies in Shenzen and Guangzhou would declare with the U.S. government, or some international organization. Obviously the Chinese government doesn't have to let inspectors into their country, but if they don't, when the GPU goes to get it's cryptographic unlock code for the day, it's not going to arrive and the GPU won't work.
The issue isn't technology.
Per https://theedgemalaysia.com/node/825089:
It doesn't take a Mensa-level IQ to figure out where chips are headed. A company in Singapore run by Chinese nationals, that had less than $6 million in cash at the end of 2023 and then buying over $4 billion in advanced chips between 2024 and 2026, isn't keeping them in Kalamazoo, Malaysia.Most of the smuggling is a case of see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil.
or, and I'm just spitballing here, you could walk the actual walk about "free markets" as well as talk the talk, and let the chips fall where they may.