US lawmakers fire back at government's chip sanctions against China, alleging glaring loopholes that let China access the latest technology

National Capitol Building in Washington D.C.

Although the latest U.S. export rules prohibit shipments of advanced chipmaking tools to many China-based fabs, making it harder to produce sophisticated chips in the People's Republic, they still contain loopholes that allow Chinese semiconductor makers to procure sophisticated technology. The main drawback of the new export rules is that they are still based on a fab-by-fab approach rather than entity-by-entity approach. 

John Moolenaar, the chairman of House Select Committee on the CCP, wrote a letter [PDF] to Gina Raimondo, Secretary of U.S. Department of Commerce, praising the placement of some of Huawei's semiconductor facilities to the Bureau of Industry and Security's (BIS) Entity List and adding controls on high-bandwidth memory (HBM) technologies, but criticizing the loopholes that continue to exist in the new export rules, weakening their effectiveness.