Should We Track AI Chips?

Since 2022, the U.S. government has restricted exports of the most advanced AI chips to China and other countries of concern. But smugglers have repeatedly circumvented those controls, diverting hundreds of thousands of chips. One estimate suggests that—in 2024 and 2025 alone—over 450,000 advanced AI chips were smuggled into China; that’s one to two cutting-edge AI supercomputers’ worth of compute as of early 2026. The United States government has ramped up enforcement to address this issue, but chips are still slipping through the cracks and into smugglers’ hands. Increasingly, U.S. policymakers see location verification methods, which help regulators determine where AI chips are physically located, as good options to detect potential smuggling and improve export control enforcement. But how viable and costly are these approaches, and how much do they actually help national security? CSET’s Jacob Feldgoise, Kyle Miller, and Hanna Dohmen dove deep into investigating how location verification methods can—and cannot—improve enforcement of export controls on these powerful chips, culminating in their report, Tracking AI Chips: Assessing Location Verification as an Export Control Enforcement Tool . I sat down with Jacob to learn more about the issue, their findings, and what those findings mean for mitigating AI chip smuggling. AI chips are undoubtedly being smuggled into China. How is that happening and at what scale? Two aspects of the AI chip trade make smuggling easier. First, it’s a globalized value chain. While most AI chips sold abroad are designed by U.S. companies, the

Smuggling of AI chips has national security implications

SOURCE     CSET, Georgetown (tier 1)
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DOCUMENT   2923ef3e-8001-4f0d-b5f9-e98e6562a998
           https://cset.georgetown.edu/article/should-we-track-ai-chips
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EVIDENCE   2 extracted excerpts
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MODEL RUN  1 run, methodology 1.0.1
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SCORE      -50  (Adverse)
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CONFIDENCE 60%