NVIDIA Corp. vehemently denied charges from China that kill switches or backdoors are in its chips, and beseeched U.S. lawmakers to not force their inclusion in the future.

“There are no back doors in NVIDIA chips. No kill switches. No spyware. That’s not how trustworthy systems are built — and never will be,” NVIDIA Chief Security Officer David Reber Jr. said in a blog post this week. He urged policymakers to abandon proposals for hardware-level tracking or disabling features, calling them a “gift to hackers and hostile actors.”

“To mitigate the risk of misuse, some pundits and policymakers propose requiring hardware ‘kill switches’ or built-in controls that can remotely disable GPUs without user knowledge and consent,” Reber Jr. wrote. “Some suspect they might already exist. NVIDIA GPUs do not and should not have kill switches and backdoors.”

The ongoing debate over hidden control mechanisms in GPUs was reignited last week when the Cyberspace Administration of China held a meeting with NVIDIA over “serious security issues” in the company’s chips. The agency claimed American experts in artificial intelligence (AI) “revealed that NVIDIA’s computing chips have location tracking and can remotely shut down the technology.”

The accusation centers on NVIDIA’s H20 chip made for the Chinese market to comply with U.S. export restrictions.

American lawmakers, meanwhile, are considering a bill that would require exported chips be built with “location verification” and assessment of mechanisms to stop unauthorized use. The Chip Security Act, if passed, would force NVIDIA and other chip makers to include tracking technology to prevent chips from being illegally exported. Further security measures could be demanded, including backdoors and remote kill switches, though no such requirements are currently listed in the bill.

Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., said the bill is intended to “prevent advanced American chips from falling into the hands of adversaries like Communist China by improving oversight of advanced chips.”

Similarly, the Trump administration’s AI Action Plan asks chipmakers and federal agencies to “explore leveraging new and existing location verification features on advanced AI compute to ensure that the chips are not in countries of concern.”