"This Is Not Trade, It Is a Security Issue"

July 28, 2025: a public letter arrived for US Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick. The signatories were former senior officials from the Department of Defense, National Security Council, and Department of Homeland Security along with think tanks and conservative-leaning technology policy experts. Their unanimous claim: "Resuming H20 AI chip exports to China is a strategic mistake threatening US security." The H20 chip: NVIDIA AI chip evaluated as having even stronger inference performance than the previously sanctioned H100. Chinese AI research labs are developing next-generation frontier AI models based on the H20 chip -- Tencent, ByteDance, and Alibaba have already placed orders totaling 16 billion USD. The security argument: the H20 is not a simple consumer chip. China under the "Military-Civil Fusion" strategy rapidly converts civilian technology to military technology -- AI chips are no exception. The US State Department had warned that DeepSeek (China leading AI research organization) is already cooperating with the Chinese military and intelligence agencies. The Commerce Department decision: the Trump administration reversed the Biden-era H20 export restriction, allowing sales to proceed -- arguing that restricting a downgraded chip while Chinese companies can access equivalent capability through other means is ineffective; the conservative security experts argue this logic misunderstands how Chinese military-civil fusion works and underestimates the inference capability advantage H20 provides for training and deploying frontier AI models at scale.