(ÃÛ¶¹ÊÓƵ)
Defense Bill Stalls.
The Senate continued its work this week on the annual defense authorization bill for fiscal year 2026 following the House’s passage of its version of the bill last week. While Senate Republican leadership hoped to pass the bill this week, movement was slow with over 800 amendments that have been offered to the bill. Most amendments won’t make it into the bill. Those that do will need to be bipartisan and generally will need to cover relevant defense and national security issues. There has been significant debate on one amendment that would curb exports of advanced artificial intelligence (AI) chips to China. With limited upcoming floor time remaining for the Senate (recess next week and government funding focus the week after), the defense bill focus will be punted for a few weeks. The slowdown could force the Senate to take the unusual step of commencing negotiations with the House to work out a final bill without having first passed its own version.
GAIN AI.
As mentioned above, Senate Republicans are debating the removal of a provision (called the GAIN AI Act) from the annual defense bill. The GAIN AI Act would restrict exports of advanced AI chips to certain countries like China by requiring companies to prioritize sales in the US over foreign-owned entities. Proponents argue it would address domestic supply chain shortages and boost US innovation by putting American companies ahead of the rest of the world for purchases of advanced AI chips. However, major tech companies (like NVIDIA) are criticizing the amendment as unnecessarily restricting global competition. The Trump administration also has criticized the amendment and pushed for Senate Republicans to soften the language or remove it. The latest debate comes just weeks after the Trump administration agreed to a deal to ease restrictions on chip sales to China that has faced criticism from lawmakers on both sides of the aisle. The fate of the GAIN AI proposal in the defense bill will show how much strain there is among the China hawks and President Trump.
TikTok Agreement.
Animated by national security concerns over ownership of social media company TikTok by a Chinese company (ByteDance), Congress passed a bipartisan law last year that required TikTok to be sold to a US entity or face a nationwide ban. At different points, President Trump has taken steps to delay that deadline. This week, he once again extended the deadline (this time to 16 December) to provide time for a deal to be finalized. The action followed high-level discussions between senior US and Chinese officials that yielded an agreement in principle that would allow TikTok to continue to operate in the US. The company would be under the control of US ownership (though ByteDance would retain a minority interest), with user data stored in the US. The tentative agreement has been viewed skeptically from Congress, with some lawmakers raising concerns about continued influence from ByteDance and reliance on its technology. President Trump and President Xi discussed the TikTok agreement among other issues in a call today. The discussions on TikTok are a precursor to broader US-China trade negotiations likely to be punctuated by a meeting between the two leaders next month.
Read much more about topics under the dome in this week's Washington Weekly .
