The San Francisco company has stopped pressing Congress for tighter export limits, Politico reported, just as China protested a U.S. ban on DeepSeek and Chinese tech giants placed more than $35 billion in orders for Nvidia chips.
By Staff Reporter
The contest between the United States and China over artificial intelligence is increasingly being fought inside the Bay Area’s own companies, and this week it exposed a widening split among three of them.
OpenAI, the San Francisco developer of ChatGPT, has stopped advocating for stricter limits on sales of advanced American chips to China, Capitol Hill aides and lobbyists told Politico in a report published on Tuesday. For much of last year, the company had publicly supported such restrictions. Its retreat comes as China hawks in Congress prepare to attach new export controls to the annual defense policy bill after the Nov. 3 midterm elections, a push opposed by Nvidia, the Santa Clara chipmaker whose processors dominate the market for AI computing.
“Silence is doing Nvidia’s work for it,” one congressional aide told Politico. Another said OpenAI’s officials “were with us on this and now their position is a bit more fuzzy.” A lobbyist offered an explanation: “They got the message. There is no appetite to challenge the president at this moment.”
What OpenAI says
OpenAI did not address its meetings with lawmakers. “We want the US to continue to have the most powerful AI models, maintain and widen its compute advantage, and lead in setting global standards,” a company spokesperson said, according to Politico’s report as summarized by The Next Web. “US labs having a substantial lead in advanced chips is key to achieving those goals, and effective export control policies are one part of that broader strategy.” Nvidia declined to comment.
The company’s public language has shifted over time. In March 2025, OpenAI told the administration it supported keeping China under “strict export controls,” according to the report. A federal policy framework it proposed in June 2026 contained a single line calling to “strengthen export controls,” without naming China.
The commercial ties between OpenAI and Nvidia have also deepened. Nvidia finalized a $30 billion equity investment in OpenAI in February, and in August agreed to serve as the sole chip supplier for an Ohio data center OpenAI will lease, according to The Next Web.
Anthropic, OpenAI’s San Francisco rival, has gone the other way. It supports several of the pending chip bills and in September left a large technology trade group over that group’s effort to soften them, Politico reported.
The White House has encouraged American companies to sell more chips abroad, and President Trump has reversed limits on some Nvidia chips bound for China in exchange for a share of the revenue. A White House official disputed that the president had eased the rules, telling Politico that the administration runs “the most rigorous export control regime in modern history.”
Beijing protests a DeepSeek ban
The report landed a day after the Department of Homeland Security published an order in the Federal Register barring federal civilian agencies from buying products from Hangzhou DeepSeek Artificial Intelligence, the Chinese start-up, and requiring them to remove its products, including third-party services built on DeepSeek’s technology, from their systems. The order was issued under the Federal Acquisition Supply Chain Security Act of 2018 and applies to civilian agencies.
China responded sharply. Mao Ning, a Foreign Ministry spokeswoman, said China “will resolutely safeguard the legitimate rights and interests of Chinese companies” and “consistently opposes the overstretching of the concept of national security,” according to The Associated Press. The Commerce Ministry expressed “strong dissatisfaction and firm opposition,” saying Washington had disregarded the consensus reached between Mr. Trump and Xi Jinping, China’s leader, and warning that China “will closely monitor the situation and take all necessary measures.”
The two leaders are expected to discuss AI when they meet in mid-November on the sidelines of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit in Shenzhen, the AP reported. Beijing proposed its own restrictions on exports of certain advanced AI models last week.
Chinese demand for Nvidia chips
Even under existing U.S. rules, Chinese demand for American chips remains enormous. ByteDance, Alibaba and Tencent have ordered more than three million of Nvidia’s new RTX PRO 5500 graphics cards, with a combined list value of more than $35 billion, Reuters reported, citing people familiar with the matter. The workstation chip is less powerful than Nvidia’s top data center processors but is among the most capable still available to Chinese buyers. Nvidia has told partners it may be able to fill only 5 to 10 percent of the quantities requested, Reuters reported.
An Nvidia spokesperson told Reuters that American firms “continue to be restricted by a combination of outdated US export controls, which cover gaming products released nearly a half decade ago, and China’s own limit on US imports.” ByteDance, Alibaba and Tencent did not respond to Reuters.
Why it matters in California
For the Bay Area, the export-control fight is not an abstraction. Nvidia, OpenAI and Anthropic are among the region’s most valuable companies, and the rules Congress writes will shape how many chips Nvidia can sell abroad, to whom, and how quickly rivals in China can close the gap with the region’s AI developers. California’s own finances are exposed as well: the Legislative Analyst’s Office has warned that the state’s revenue outlook rests heavily on AI-driven stock valuations.
The companies’ divergent positions also reflect a broader question for the region: whether its leading AI firms see Chinese competition chiefly as a security risk to be contained or as a market to be served. The lame-duck session after the election, when lawmakers will decide whether to write new chip limits into the defense bill, is likely to force that question into the open.
