Federal lawmakers are pressing forward with bills that would require artificial intelligence (AI) chips to carry built-in geo-tracking technology to keep sensitive chips out of hostile hands — the latest conflagration in an escalating AI turf battle with China.

The Chip Security Act, announced last week, would keep hardware from “falling into the hands of adversaries like Communist China” and give the Secretary of Commerce authority to verify the location of hardware and put mandatory location controls on commercial companies. Exporters would be obligated to inform the Bureau of Industry and Security if their hardware is tampered with or diverted somewhere it shouldn’t be.

“We must do better at maintaining and expanding our position in the global market, while safeguarding America’s technological edge,” the bill’s author, Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., said in a statement. “With these enhanced security measures, we can continue to expand access to U.S. technology without compromising our national security.”

The bill covers a wide range of products classified as 3A090, 4A090, 4A003.z and 3A001.z export control classification numbers (ECCNs) that include advanced processors for AI, AI servers, HPC servers and general-purpose electronics of strategic concern because of potential military utility or dual-use risk. Manufacturers would be required to embed hardware or firmware capable of reporting each device’s physical location to a centralized registry maintained by the Commerce Department.

Daniel Newman, CEO, The Futurum Group, tweeted on X, “this would solve a lot of issues with AI chip exports and should enable selling into expanded markets so long as the use isn’t nefarious.”

If passed, the bill would mandate a one-year study to be conducted by the Commerce and Defense departments.

Cotton’s bill comes on the heels of similar legislation in the House of Representatives.

Last week, Rep. Bill Foster, D-Wisc., a physicist, said he planned to introduce in the House a bill that would require advanced AI chipmakers like NVIDIA Corp. to include a built-in location reporting system. The system will use readily available technology to find the general country-level location of an AI chip.

Since 2022, both the Trump and Biden administrations have imposed bans against the export of advanced chips to China to limit its access to cutting-edge technology and help ensure the U.S.’s dominance in AI. Export controls were expanded to include previously allowed chips like NVIDIA’s H20 and AMD’s MI308, leading to $5.5 billion and $800 million write-offs from each company, respectively.

NVIDIA has said it isn’t capable of tracking its hardware after it’s been sold, and denied concerns of widespread chip smuggling.

So far, the bans and sanctions have been criticized for being ineffective. Former Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo called them a “fool’s errand.”

“It’s hard to imagine that AI processing, and by extension AI chips, is anything but the proverbial genie that can’t be put back in the bottle. The critical development for generative AI, so-called multi-head attention, happened years ago; Google, OpenAI, and NVIDIA put it into practice 18 months ago, an entire generation in technology these days,” Guy Currier, vice president and chief technology officer of Visible Impact, a Futurum Group company, said in a message. “This knowledge, widely available over this span of time, has combined with developments in chip architectures and manufacturing to make AI training and inferencing more available to more countries and further corners of the globe. It is unlikely that any organization, company, or nation will be limited in training or running AI at this point merely by being locked out of the U.S. market.”