Republican lawmakers Carlos Gimenez, Mario Diaz-Balart and Maria Elvira Salazar demand Trump administration shut off commercial support for Cuba's Communist regime after oil blockade.

US approves sale of Nvidia's advanced AI chips to China The US government has given chip giant Nvidia the green light to sell its advanced artificial intelligence (AI) processors in China, the Department of Commerce said on Tuesday. The H200, Nvidia's second-most-advanced semiconductor, had been restricted by Washington over concerns that it would give China's technology industry and military an edge over the US. The Commerce Department said the chips can be shipped to China granted that there is sufficient supply of the processors in the US. President Donald Trump said last month that he would allow the chip sales to approved customers in China and collect a 25% fee. Nvidia's spokesperson told the BBC that the company welcomed the move, saying it will benefit manufacturing and jobs in the US.

What is Cartel de los Soles? Does'America First' make the US weaker? Who is Marjorie Taylor Greene? A bipartisan group of United States senators, including prominent Republican China hawk Tom Cotton, has unveiled a bill that would block the administration of President Donald Trump from loosening rules restricting Beijing's access to artificial intelligence chips for 2.5 years. The bill, unveiled on Thursday, is known as the SAFE CHIPS Act and was filed by Republican Senator Pete Ricketts and Democrat Chris Coons.

Even as he's vowed to push the United States ahead in artificial intelligence research, President Donald Trump's threats to alter federal government contracts with chipmakers and slap new tariffs on the semiconductor industry may put new speed bumps in front of the tech industry. Since taking office, Trump has said he would place tariffs on foreign production of computer chips and semiconductors in order to return chip manufacturing to the U.S. The president and Republican lawmakers have also threatened to end the CHIPS and Science Act, a sweeping Biden administration-era law that also sought to boost domestic production. But economic experts have warned that Trump's dual-pronged approach could slow, or potentially harm, the administration's goal of ensuring that the U.S. maintains a competitive edge in artificial intelligence research. Saikat Chaudhuri, an expert on corporate growth and innovation at U.C. Berkeley's Haas School of Business, called Trump's derision of the CHIPS Act surprising because one of the biggest bottlenecks for the advancement of AI has been chip production. Most countries, Chaudhuri said, are trying to encourage chip production and the import of chips at favorable rates.

In its notice, the Commerce Department said that drones could be used to damage physical infrastructure in a collision, deliver an explosive payload or gather information about critical infrastructure, including building layouts. In addition, with critical infrastructure in the United States increasingly reliant on drones, any efforts to remotely incapacitate them would create a risk to national security. The department added that in the past, drone companies based in China had pushed updates to their devices to create no-fly restrictions that disabled them in conflict zones defined by the companies. The notice said that the Commerce Department was also considering whether any measures could mitigate the risks and allow the sale of Chinese drones to continue, such as certain design requirements or cybersecurity software. The proposed rule is part of a broader effort by the Biden administration to examine and eliminate vulnerabilities in high-tech products and communications infrastructure that collect huge amounts of data about Americans.

The US has announced new export restrictions targeting China's ability to make advanced semiconductors, drawing swift condemnation from Beijing. Washington is expanding efforts to curb exports of state-of-the-art chips to China that can be used in advanced weapons systems and in artificial intelligence. The announcement on Monday came a few weeks before Donald Trump returns as president, where he is expected to bolster Washington's hawkish stance on China. On Monday the commerce secretary, Gina Raimondo, said Joe Biden's presidency had been especially tough in "strategically addressing China's military modernisation through export controls". Biden's national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, said: "The United States has taken significant steps to protect our technology from being used by our adversaries in ways that threaten our national security."

The Biden administration is expected to announce a sweeping set of measures on Monday designed to further restrain China's ability to develop advanced artificial intelligence, people familiar with the matter told WIRED. The controls could include sanctioning dozens of Chinese companies that produce equipment for making semiconductors, as well as placing restrictions on a handful of chip manufacturing plants, some of which have ties to the Chinese tech giant Huawei. The US Department of Commerce has also discussed including controls on the sale of high-bandwidth memory, or HBM, an advanced kind of 3D-stacked computer memory component that is often used in high-performance GPUs and customized AI chips. Bloomberg previously reported that the Biden administration was considering clamping down on China's access to HBM chips. In total, the Biden administration could end up adding around 200 Chinese firms to an entity list maintained by the Bureau of Industry and Security--an agency within the Commerce department--which would require other companies to acquire special licenses to supply them with software or products from the United States.

The United States Department of Commerce has proposed prohibiting key Chinese software and hardware in connected vehicles on American roads due to national security concerns, a move that would in effect bar Chinese cars and trucks from the US market. The planned regulation, proposed on Monday, would also force American and other major automakers in years ahead to remove key Chinese software and hardware from vehicles in the US. President Joe Biden's administration has raised concerns about data collection on US drivers and infrastructure by connected Chinese vehicles and potential foreign manipulation of vehicles connected to the internet and navigation systems. In February, the White House ordered an investigation. The proposed prohibitions would prevent testing of self-driving cars on US roads by Chinese automakers, extend to vehicle software and hardware produced by Russia, and could be extended to other US adversaries.

The U.S. Commerce Department is planning to reveal proposed rules as soon as Monday that would ban Chinese- and Russian-made hardware and software for connected vehicles, people familiar with the matter said. The Commerce Department has been meeting with industry experts in recent months looking to address security concerns raised by a new generation of so-called smart cars. The move would include bans on use and testing of Chinese and Russian technology for automated driving systems and vehicle communications systems, the people said. While the bans mostly focus on software, the proposed rules will include some hardware, they said.

The US has banned companies like Nvidia from selling their most advanced AI chips to China since 2022. But if loopholes exist, profit-hungry corporations will find and exploit them. The Information published a bombshell report on Thursday detailing how Oracle allows TikTok owner ByteDance to rent Nvidia's most advanced chips to train AI models on US soil. ByteDance, which many US lawmakers believe has direct ties to the Chinese government, is reportedly renting US-based servers containing Nvidia's coveted H100 chips from US cloud computing company Oracle to train AI models. The practice, which runs against the spirit of the US government's chip regulations, is technically allowed because Oracle is merely renting out the chips on American soil, not selling them to companies in China.