Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) has demanded Commerce Department records to investigate whether the Trump administration weakened safeguards meant to stop advanced chips from reaching China through overseas middlemen.
In a July 17 letter, Warren asked Jeffrey Kessler, under secretary of commerce for industry and security, to provide six categories of records by Aug. 7.
The records include instructions given to chip manufacturers, license applications and decisions, customer-screening forms, company compliance reports, and internal assessments of how the administration’s enforcement policy affected controls on foreign-made AI chips.
Warren, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Banking Committee, invoked a provision of the Export Control Reform Act that requires the Commerce Department’s Bureau of Industry and Security (BIS) to provide certain export-control information at the request of a committee chairman or ranking minority member….