Comment by Alan F. Estevez

I announced during my testimony in July before both the Senate and the House that I was doing a China review. This is part of that China review. So we are going to continue to look at not just what we did in semiconductors, but areas that the Chinese are using to threaten the United States and its allies. And we will continue that kind of work. Obviously semiconductors at the tip of the spear of tech needed for just about everything. And the rule we put out, I'll briefly summarize what's in that. I think most of you have already written about it, and I've heard ad nauseum briefings from us what's in it, but puts restrictions on highest end chips for artificial intelligence and for super computers. We invoke the foreign direct product rule on that, which is an executorial regulation that says, if this is made with US... If whatever the product is made with US technology or US software, you also cannot export that to the restricted place, which essentially means that a Chinese designed chip that they expected to be fabbed at TSMC cannot be fabbed at TSMC and sold back. So it's pretty stringent restrictions on the highest end chips. [...] So we work with our multilateral allies in doing that. I know there's going to be some questions about where's the multilateral and what we just did. And I will say that's a work in progress. We moved out at this point because we felt we needed to for the national security reasons. We were talking to our allies. No one was surprised when we did this, and they all know that we're expecting them to cover likewise, and we're working those details with the specific allies around that. Unverified source (2022)