The United States House of Representatives Foreign Affairs Committee has overwhelmingly voted to advance a bill that would give Congress more power over artificial intelligence chip exports despite pushback from White House AI tsar David Sacks and a social media campaign against the legislation.

Representative Brian Mast of Florida, a Republican and the chair of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, introduced the “AI Overwatch Act” in December after US President Donald Trump greenlit shipments of Nvidia’s powerful H200 AI chips to China.

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The legislation, which still needs to clear the full House and Senate, would give the House Foreign Affairs Committee and the Senate Banking Committee 30 days to review and potentially block licences issued to export advanced AI chips to China and other adversaries.

The bill claims that those “countries of concern” also include countries beyond China, such as Russia, Iran, North Korea, Cuba and Venezuela.

The bill also requires the US Department of Commerce to provide lawmakers with a full, detailed application that shows that the chips will not be used for military, intelligence or surveillance applications conducted by adversarial nations to the US.

One source said the bill’s odds of being passed increased after a coordinated media campaign last week against the bill.

“These advanced chips need to fall under the same oversight as any other military-related system,” Mast said at a session on Wednesday before the committee vote. “This is about the future of military warfare.”

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The tech advocacy group, Americans for Responsible Innovation, which has been pushing for the bill, said in a fact sheet that the act will “slow China’s progress in developing AI that could rival US capabilities”.

“America must win the AI arms race,” Mast said in a release when he first introduced the bill late last year.

White House pushback

A spokesperson for Sacks and the White House did not respond to requests for comment.

Last week, Sacks shared a post from an X account called “Wall Street Mav” that claimed the bill was being orchestrated by “Never Trumpers” and former staffers of Presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden to undermine Trump’s authority and his America First strategy.

The post singled out the CEO of AI firm Anthropic, Dario Amodei, claiming he hired former Biden staffers to push the issue.

“Correct,” Sacks wrote.

An Anthropic spokesperson declined to comment on the claims and the bill. But Amodei has been outspoken about preventing China from getting advanced chips like the H200.

“It would be a big mistake to ship these chips,” Amodei said on Tuesday at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. “I think this is crazy. It’s a bit like selling nuclear weapons to North Korea.”

Conservative activist Laura Loomer, among others, also posted on X criticism of the bill last week, calling it “pro-China sabotage disguised as oversight”.

Before the vote, Mast and other committee members rejected the online attacks.

“There are special interest groups out there right now with millions of dollars funded by the very people who will profit off the sale of these chips and others that … are waging a social media campaign war … against this bill, which the chairman is advancing to protect the national security interest of the United States of America,” said Representative Michael McCaul, a Republican congressman from Texas. “Shame on them.”

Nvidia did not respond to requests for comment, nor did the US Commerce Department, which oversees export controls.