Stop Stealing Our Chips Act

The Stop Stealing Our Chips Act is a bipartisan U.S. congressional bill (introduced in the Senate in April 2025 and the House in December 2025) to strengthen enforcement of export controls on advanced AI chips by creating a whistleblower incentive program at the Bureau of Industry and Security (BIS). The bill amends the Export Control Reform Act of 2018 and targets the smuggling of American-made semiconductors to adversaries including China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea.

Quick Assessment

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Overview

The Stop Stealing Our Chips Act responds to persistent evidence that advanced U.S.-made AI chips are being diverted to China and other adversaries through illegal smuggling networks, despite existing export control measures. Estimates cited in connection with the bill suggest roughly 140,000 AI chips were smuggled to China in 2024 alone, and that known smuggling networks have each exceeded $100 million in scale. Sponsors argue that BIS, the primary enforcement agency for export controls, lacks the timely, granular information needed to detect and disrupt these networks effectively — a gap that the whistleblower program is designed to fill.

The bill's core mechanism is modeled on the Securities and Exchange Commission's (SEC) whistleblower program. Individuals — including non-U.S. citizens — who submit original, credible information that leads to a BIS investigation and the collection of fines would be eligible to receive between 10% and 30% of the fines collected. A secure, public portal would be established within 120 days of enactment for submissions. BIS would be required to initiate formal investigations within 60 days of receiving a credible report and provide status updates every 30 days. The program is self-financing: rewards are drawn from a dedicated fund populated by violation fines, with any surplus returned to the Treasury. No new Congressional appropriations are required.

The bill is distinct from the 2022 CHIPS and Science Act, which focuses on domestic semiconductor manufacturing subsidies ($39 billion) and research investment ($13 billion). Where the CHIPS and Science Act is primarily an industrial policy instrument, the Stop Stealing Our Chips Act is an enforcement instrument targeting the circumvention of existing export restrictions. It is most closely related to the companion Chip Security ActPolicyChip Security ActThe Chip Security Act (H.R. 3447/S. 1705) would require location verification mechanisms on advanced AI chips to prevent export control evasion, representing a concrete compute governance intervent..., which takes a complementary technical approach by requiring location verification on high-end AI chips sold by manufacturers.

History and Legislative Background

Broader Export Control Context

The Stop Stealing Our Chips Act emerges from a multi-year escalation in U.S. semiconductor export restrictions targeting China. BIS restrictions introduced in October 2022 significantly curtailed the export of advanced chips to Chinese entities, with further expansions in 2023. These controls have been aimed principally at preventing Chinese firms — including military-linked entities — from acquiring chips capable of training frontier AI models or powering advanced surveillance systems.

Despite these controls, smuggling through intermediaries, shell companies, and third-country re-exports has remained a persistent enforcement problem. Policy analysts at American Compass and other organizations have documented that the profits from known chip smuggling cases have substantially exceeded BIS's annual export enforcement budget, creating asymmetric incentives that favor evasion.

Introduction

The House version of the bill was introduced on December 3, 2025, by Representatives Tom Kean, Jr. (R-NJ) and Julie Johnson (D-TX), with cosponsors including Rep. John Moolenaar (R-MI, Chairman of the House Select Committee on Strategic Competition with China), Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi (D-IL, Ranking Member of the same committee), Rep. Lisa McClain (R-MI, House Republican Conference Chairwoman), and Rep. Josh Harder (D-CA). The bipartisan composition of the sponsorship reflects the broad legislative consensus around export control enforcement as a national security priority.

A Senate companion bill was introduced by Senators Mike Rounds (R-SD) and Mark Warner (D-VA). According to research connected to the bill's introduction, the Senate version aligns with the House bill's core provisions, including the SEC-modeled reward structure and the BIS portal requirement.

Sponsors framed the legislation as addressing a specific enforcement gap rather than a policy gap — the legal framework for export controls already exists, but BIS is said to lack sufficient informational inputs to act on violations before they compound. Rep. Moolenaar characterized AI chip access as central to what he described as a new phase of U.S.-China strategic competition, while Sen. Rounds described smuggling methods as posing grave national security risks.

Key Provisions

Whistleblower Incentive Program

The centerpiece of the bill is a whistleblower incentive program funded entirely through fines collected from export control violators. Eligible whistleblowers must provide information that is original (not previously known to BIS), credible, and that leads to a successful enforcement action. Rewards range from 10% to 30% of fines collected in cases where the whistleblower's information was a contributing factor.

Certain categories of individuals are explicitly excluded from the program: known terrorists, individuals with prior criminal convictions related to the violations being reported, and federal employees acting within the scope of their official duties.

Secure Reporting Portal

BIS would be required to establish a publicly accessible, secure online portal for whistleblower submissions within 120 days of enactment. The portal is intended to reduce friction in reporting and provide a formal, trackable channel for tips that currently may go unreported or be submitted informally.

Protections for Whistleblowers

The bill includes both confidentiality protections — BIS would be prohibited from disclosing the identity of a whistleblower without consent — and anti-retaliation safeguards for individuals who report violations. These provisions are intended to make it safer for employees of firms involved in export transactions, as well as other individuals with relevant knowledge, to come forward without fear of professional or legal consequences.

Investigation Timelines

Once BIS receives a credible tip through the portal, it must initiate a formal investigation within 60 days and provide status updates to the whistleblower every 30 days thereafter. This structured timeline is designed to ensure that actionable intelligence is acted upon promptly rather than deprioritized within BIS's existing workload.

Funding and Appropriations

The program requires no new Congressional appropriations. All costs — including whistleblower rewards, portal maintenance, and program administration — are to be funded from a dedicated account populated by fines collected from export control violators. Surplus funds are returned to the U.S. Treasury.

Relationship to the Chip Security Act

The Stop Stealing Our Chips Act is often discussed alongside the Chip Security ActPolicyChip Security ActThe Chip Security Act (H.R. 3447/S. 1705) would require location verification mechanisms on advanced AI chips to prevent export control evasion, representing a concrete compute governance intervent... (H.R. 3447), a complementary but distinct piece of legislation led by Rep. Moolenaar, Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR), and Rep. Bill Huizenga (R-MI). Where the Stop Stealing Our Chips Act focuses on enforcement through human intelligence — empowering insiders and observers to report violations — the Chip Security Act takes a technical approach, requiring chipmakers to implement location verification mechanisms on advanced AI chips so that their whereabouts can be tracked after sale.

The Semiconductor Industry Association (SIA) has expressed opposition to the Chip Security Act as of early 2026, though no specific detailed objections were documented in available sources. No similar industry opposition has been reported against the Stop Stealing Our Chips Act specifically.

The House Foreign Affairs Committee was scheduled to mark up the Chip Security Act in early March 2026, suggesting that both pieces of legislation are advancing in parallel as part of a broader legislative effort to close enforcement gaps in chip export controls.

AI Safety Relevance

The Stop Stealing Our Chips Act does not engage directly with AI safety, alignment research, or existential risk in the technical sense used by the AI safety research community. Its sponsors frame it entirely in terms of geopolitical competition and national security: the concern is that China acquiring advanced U.S.-made chips strengthens the Chinese military's and state-linked firms' AI capabilities, which poses strategic risks to the United States.

The bill's indirect relevance to AI safety concerns is more structural. Export controls on advanced semiconductors are one of the few concrete policy levers that could slow the proliferation of frontier AI capabilities to actors — including state actors — who might deploy those capabilities in ways that are destabilizing or harmful. To the extent that compute governance is considered a relevant tool in the broader landscape of AI risk mitigation, legislation that strengthens enforcement of compute export controls sits within that broader policy domain. However, no explicit connection to AI alignment, safety standards, or long-term risk is made in the bill's text or in sponsors' statements.

Criticisms and Limitations

No substantive public criticisms of the Stop Stealing Our Chips Act specifically have been documented in available sources. The bill's sponsors and cosponsors have presented it as a straightforward enforcement improvement with bipartisan support, and no opposition statements from lawmakers, civil liberties organizations, or industry groups have been reported.

Several broader limitations and concerns can be identified from the wider policy context, though these are not direct critiques of this bill:

Enforcement scope and smuggling scale: Even with a well-functioning whistleblower program, the scale of chip smuggling networks — with individual networks reportedly exceeding $100 million — raises questions about whether whistleblower-driven enforcement can meaningfully disrupt sophisticated, well-resourced evasion operations. Critics of U.S. chip export controls more broadly have argued that BIS is structurally under-resourced relative to the enforcement challenge, a concern that a self-financing whistleblower program addresses only partially.

Potential chilling effects: Whistleblower programs in other regulatory domains have sometimes produced chilling effects on legitimate business activity when employees become uncertain about what constitutes a reportable violation. The chip export control space involves complex re-export rules and end-use verification requirements, and it is possible that a high-profile whistleblower incentive program could generate defensive overcompliance or internal reporting friction within legitimate semiconductor supply chains.

Effectiveness benchmarking: No quantitative evidence was available at the time of the bill's introduction on the likely effectiveness of an SEC-style whistleblower program in the export controls context. The SEC program is frequently cited as a model, but the semiconductor supply chain differs significantly from financial markets in terms of the visibility of violations, the number of potential whistleblowers, and the structure of enforcement.

Related technical limitations: Analyses of the companion Chip Security ActPolicyChip Security ActThe Chip Security Act (H.R. 3447/S. 1705) would require location verification mechanisms on advanced AI chips to prevent export control evasion, representing a concrete compute governance intervent... have raised concerns about the spoofability of location verification mechanisms and the cybersecurity risks associated with mandated backdoor-style controls. While these concerns are not directly applicable to the whistleblower-focused Stop Stealing Our Chips Act, they underscore the broader difficulty of the enforcement problem that the bill is attempting to address.

Key Uncertainties

• Whether the bill will advance past the introduction stage and receive committee hearings or floor votes in either chamber
• Whether a whistleblower program modeled on the SEC's will prove effective in the semiconductor export control context, given differences in market structure and violation visibility
• Whether BIS has sufficient institutional capacity to process a large volume of whistleblower submissions within the mandated 60-day investigation window
• Whether fine revenues will be sufficient to sustain the program's operations and meaningful reward payments over time, given that successful prosecutions may be infrequent
• The extent to which the bill, if enacted, would complement or overlap with the Chip Security ActPolicyChip Security ActThe Chip Security Act (H.R. 3447/S. 1705) would require location verification mechanisms on advanced AI chips to prevent export control evasion, representing a concrete compute governance intervent...'s technical verification approach

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