China accuses US of undermining trade talks with warnings against Huawei chips

BEIJING – The Chinese government accused the Trump administration of undermining recent trade talks in Geneva with its warning that using Huawei Technologies’ artificial-intelligence chips “anywhere in the world” would violate US export controls.

The Commerce Department had said in a statement last week that it was issuing guidance to make clear that the use of Huawei Ascend chips is a breach of the US government’s export controls. The agency said at the time that it would also warn the public about “the potential consequences of allowing US AI chips to be used for training and inference of Chinese AI models.”

The Commerce Department’s statement has since changed to say that the agency was issuing guidance about “the risks of using PRC advanced computing ICs, including specific Huawei Ascend chips,” stripping the “anywhere in the world” reference. The formal Commerce guidance, dated May 13, says using Huawei’s Ascend chips “risks” violating export controls.

The changes weren’t enough to appease Beijing, which issued a statement on May 19 saying it had “negotiated and communicated with the US at all levels through the China-US economic and trade consultation mechanism, pointing out that the US’s actions seriously undermined the consensus reached at the high-level talks between China and the US in Geneva.” The Asian nation’s Commerce Ministry demanded in the statement that the US “correct its mistakes.”

Spokespeople for the US Commerce Department and the White House didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment.

Tensions over Huawei’s next-generation of chips underscore how fragile trade talks remain between the US and China. The Commerce Department’s guidance last week stood to make it all the more difficult for Shenzhen-based Huawei to fulfill its ambitions of developing more powerful semiconductors for AI and smartphones, efforts that have already hit major snags because of US sanctions.

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