Revoking export controls on Nvidia AI chips, or GPUs, would be a “huge victory” for China and DeepSeek, who see access to the sophisticated chips as a strategic necessity for AI dominance, said Helen Toner, director of strategy at Georgetown’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology and a former OpenAI board member.
“I think it’s possible that Nvidia will use this to persuade [President] Trump that the export controls are just holding back U.S. industry and that he should just revoke them,” she told Fortune.
Toner, who left OpenAI’s board in November 2023 in the aftermath of her controversial vote to fire CEO Sam Altman, made her comments as U.S. industry leaders and policymakers come to terms with the sudden rise of China’s DeepSeek.
DeepSeek grabbed headlines last week after releasing an ultraefficient, low-cost AI model that beat OpenAI’s most sophisticated model, o1, on several benchmarks. DeepSeek got its computing power after purchasing large amounts of special Nvidia chips that were designed to comply with 2022 U.S. export controls and were purportedly less powerful than Nvidia’s most sophisticated AI chips, which were already banned from China. The special China-focused chips were also banned a year later by the Biden administration—but DeepSeek already had them.
While there are still many unanswered questions about how DeepSeek developed its sophisticated AI models, some industry observers have pointed to its success as evidence that chip export restrictions are ineffective, and do more harm to the chip companies than to the targets of the restrictions.
“The big question is whether or not the Trump administration will pick up where the last administration left off,” Toner said, pointing out that in his last week in office Biden announced a new effort that would strengthen the earlier export controls. “But they could decide to step in and weaken it,” she said.
Notably, the latest updates to the export controls from the Biden team also included measures to stop China from bypassing Nvidia and using manufacturing leader Huawei, through shell companies, to get TSMC (Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co., which designs and manufactures chips for Nvidia and others) to manufacture chips for the company.
“Without access to TSMC, Huawei has to rely on [Chinese manufacturer] SMIC to fab their chips, and SMIC is around two generations behind the leading edge, so that’s a meaningful disadvantage,” she noted.
That said, Toner emphasized that she has “mixed feelings” about the export controls, saying that it is an “open question” whether they are ultimately a wise strategy. But now that the U.S. has started down this path, she explained, it should stay the course.
“It doesn’t make any sense to try to walk it back,” she explained. “We’ve paid the price … putting China on high alert that chips are a strategic technology, and incentivizing the whole global supply chain to avoid using U.S. components so as not to be subject to extraterritorial controls.” The focus, she said, should be on making sure the controls actually work and are enforced as intended.
Toner’s take is similar to that of Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, who published an essay today making the case that export control policies “are even more existentially important than they were a week ago.” Export controls, he said, are vitally important to keep democratic nations at the forefront of AI development. “In the end, AI companies in the U.S. and other democracies must have better models than those in China if we want to prevail,” he wrote. “But we shouldn’t hand the Chinese Communist Party technological advantages when we don’t have to.”
However, Toner said that DeepSeek, as well as China’s Alibaba—which released a new version of its Qwen model today that it claimed surpasses DeepSeek’s R1—are not currently overtaking U.S. frontier AI efforts, and that it is not what a16z founder Marc Andreessen called “AI’s Sputnik moment.”
“So far, DeepSeek is acting as a fast follower, not leading the pack,” she said. Chinese access to compute remains quite restricted, Toner said, adding that it also has a talent disadvantage, though restrictive U.S. immigration policy helps China to recruit better talent.
“China is doing everything they can to keep up with the U.S. in AI, and they’re doing well at fast-following,” she said. “But to imply they’re out ahead of us is clearly wrong.”
