Brian McGrail
@brianmcgrail
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AI Policy. Attorney. Former @CommerceGov. Tweets are in my personal capacity.
Joined June 2010
Influence ops are surprisingly sloppy
Something strange happened on conservative Twitter on Thursday. A dozen right-wing influencers suddenly became passionate about semiconductor export policy, posting nearly identical (and often false) attacks over a 27-hour period on a bill most people have never heard of. 🧵
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Great to see someone in Congress finally calling out NVIDIA and Jensen Huang for selling the US to China for a profit
I believe America must win the AI Race against China. Jensen Huang, you think “China is going to win the AI Race.” We’re not the same. I don’t believe in betting against America, but clearly you do. @nvidianewsroom
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PSA, apropos of nothing of course: if a bunch of people who had never before engaged on a deeply technocratic issue suddenly weigh in on that issue with identical yet also entirely out-of-left-field takes, people will probably not believe it was an organic phenomenon.
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What I've been telling people about selling US chips to China: you might gain market share in one part of the tech stack, but you lose all the others. China gets more competitive clouds, better models, more inference capacity, cheaper tokens, more apps, more users.
The more H200s and smuggled Blackwells China gets, the more easily they can offload their shittier Huawei chips into foreign markets. TBD what volumes they'll reach, but it's just another way this policy cuts against the admin's stated goal of promoting the US tech stack abroad.
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Something strange happened on conservative Twitter on Thursday. A dozen right-wing influencers suddenly became passionate about semiconductor export policy, posting nearly identical (and often false) attacks over a 27-hour period on a bill most people have never heard of. 🧵
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So your thesis is Congress reviewing a license for an advanced chip already offered to China is actually a gift to China… Right, that makes sense. This isn’t a serious argument — it’s NVIDIA’s lobbying talking points to sell chips to China.
The AI Overwatch Act (H.R. 6875) may sound like a good idea, but when you examine it closely, it’s pro-China sabotage disguised as oversight. What will this bill do? It yanks control of advanced AI chip exports away from President Trump who is aggressively blocking CCP access to
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Trump is implementing his promise to sell H200 AI chips to China in exchange for 25% of revenue. Two policies make this work: a BIS export rule + a 25% import tariff. 🧵1/10
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The Chamber of Commerce is now putting AI preemption as one of its loyalty tests for all federal endorsements This is how Big Tech buys itself out of accountability A preemption law would kill the little progress we’ve made for privacy, nondiscrimination, and AI price gouging
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Particularly when juxtaposed against the “win the race” justification for the preemption EO
Proof that the Big Tech lobby's "national security" argument was always a hoax.
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Great to see NVIDIA has implemented location verification for Blackwell-generation AI chips. The feature reportedly uses tech we've discussed a lot in the past: time-delay based geolocation + confidential computing. Good for balancing privacy and security.
This new bill sets up location tracking for exported data center AI chips. The goal is to tackle chip smuggling into China. But is AI chip tracking actually useful/feasible? 🧵
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Expanded H200 capacity means less capacity to make Blackwells for American companies. They compete for the same limited advanced manufacturing capacity at TSMC.
Nvidia is evaluating expanding production capacity for its H200 AI chips after Chinese orders surpassed current output according to sources briefed on the situation https://t.co/tYuKFytge5
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Do we have any idea what the basis for this "several million" claim is?
Very interesting. The White House decided to allow Nvidia’s H200 exports to China because it expects Huawei to produce several million units of the 910C next year.
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Sign here: https://t.co/YmW2KmqP7l
https://t.co/c2vHvrY4OA
https://t.co/ImFyTL5uS0 From Scott: > Qualia Research Institute announces their spinoff effort ClusterFree. Cluster headaches (aka “suicide headaches”) are probably the most painful medical condition known to science,
astralcodexten.com
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Enjoyed talking to @newrepublic for their story on the fight over ai regulation, I was feeling a bit spicier than usual
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AI preemption is hideously unpopular. Republicans will look back on this EO one day and ask: "What were we thinking?"
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It does look like the “legislative proposal” that Sacks and Kratsios have been tasked with creating is supposed to exempt child safety laws. But that isn’t the part of the EO that anyone’s concerned about. A legislative proposal is just a proposal. It doesn’t do anything—it’s
This latter section is important. If you read statements about this EO that say things like it “threatens state safeguards for kids” or such, you know either they haven’t actually read the EO or they are willfully ignoring what it says. Either way, you can ignore them.
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AI concentration of power is not just about AI companies getting rich. As a technology, AI can better model consumers' willingness-to-pay and thereby exploit them. Price discrimination is *just* *one* *example*, eg RealPage uses AI to help landlords collude to jack up the rent
EXCLUSIVE: We uncovered a secret corporate scheme to raise grocery prices. We found that Instacart is using AI algorithms to charge customers different prices for the same items. The scary part? It's not just online. It's in physical grocery stores too. Our months-long
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Given all the conversation about unilateral executive authority to block state AI laws, I wanted to share this important insight that @OpenAI included in their submission Action Plan submission to the White House
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