Malaysia will require trade permits for U.S. AI chips

Malaysia plays a greater role in helping the US to prevent advanced AI chips from ending up in China.

The Malaysian Ministry of Investments, Trade and Industry has announced new restrictions on exporting AI chips of American origin from the country on Monday. Individuals and companies are now obliged to inform the Malaysian authorities at least 30 days in advance when they export or transfer American AI chips, immediately in force.

“Malaysia is determined against any attempt to bypass export controls or to undertake illegal trading activities by a person or company who are confronted press release.

The alleged chip smuggling of our AI chips in China has emerged several times in recent months.

Anthropic claimed that China had already set up advanced chip smuggling networks in a blog post in April. The post also claimed that smugglers went to extreme effort to bring AI chips to China, including the use of prosthetic baby bumps filled with chips, and that smugglers sent GPUs alongside live lobsters.

Anthropic’s April -Blogpost was written in favor of the US who imposed more AI -chip export rules to prevent this type of smuggling. Those limitations will probably arrive in the near future.

Last week, Bloomberg reported That the Trump administration was planning to further limit the export of AI chips, from companies such as Nvidia to Malaysia and Thailand, to prevent China from having access to this AI chips through a different way of entering. The Trump government has not yet made an official announcement about this.

The US Department of Trade is also working on its own set of general US AI Chip export restrictions after formally withdraw the AI diffusion rules of the BIDEN administration in May.