An open letter dated July 28, 2025, in which 20 former national security officials and policy professionals urged Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick to reverse the administration's decision to resume sales of Nvidia's H20 AI chip to China, which the letter characterized as a strategic misstep. The letter was hosted by Americans for Responsible Innovation (ari.us) and addressed to the US Department of Commerce. It arrived roughly two weeks after Commerce gave Nvidia clearance to resume H20 sales to China in connection with broader trade discussions that included rare earth elements.
Signatories
The letter carried 20 signatories. Named signatories include Matt Pottinger, former deputy national security adviser during the first Trump term; Stewart Baker, former assistant secretary of Homeland Security under George W. Bush; and David Feith, former National Security Council member. The full signatory list appears in the raw source.
Argument
The letter advanced four arguments against resuming H20 exports.
First, it argued that the H20 is an advanced chip central to China's AI ambitions rather than an outdated AI chip. The letter described the H20 as optimized for inference, the process it associated with capability gains in latest-generation reasoning models, and stated that for inference tasks the H20 outperforms the H100, which is already restricted. It noted that Chinese AI labs bulk-ordered H20s after the release of DeepSeek-R1.
Second, it argued that exporting more H20s to China would leave fewer advanced chips for the United States, framing the AI chip industry as supply-constrained. The letter stated that projected US data-center demand alone would require 90% of global chip supply through 2030, that Nvidia's Blackwell was sold out through Q4 2025, and that Chinese firms including Tencent, ByteDance, and Alibaba had ordered $16 billion in H20s, consuming the same upstream capacity as Blackwell.
Third, it argued that the chips would support China's military. The letter stated: "While the biggest buyers of Nvidia's H20 chip are nominally civilian companies in China, we fully expect the H20 and the AI models it supports to be deployed by China's People's Liberation Army." It cited Military-Civil Fusion and a US State Department finding that DeepSeek "willingly provided and likely will continue to provide support to China's military and intelligence operations."
Fourth, it argued that loosening H20 restrictions would weaken export controls generally, contending that the policy reversal creates confusion among allies and competitors and signals a weakening of US resolve on other trade and national-security trade-offs.
Reception and positioning
The letter brought together the China-hawk wing associated with MAGA-aligned policy and the AI-safety critique of H20 sales. It preceded reporting on an H20 licensing backlog in August 2025. The raw source places it alongside CSIS — DeepSeek, Huawei, Export Controls, and the Future of the U.S.-China AI Race (Allen, March 2025) and CSET + DOJ + CSIS — US-China AI National-Security Axis (composite source summary) as part of the same national-security export-control debate.
Relationships
- supports: Export Controls (AI), Chip Smuggling and Export-Control Evasion, AI and National Security, BIS Framework for AI Diffusion — Interim Final Rule (Jan 13, 2025).
- contradicts: The administration's July 2025 H20 licensing decision (not itself a wiki source).
- depends-on: Nvidia & TSMC — AI Compute Infrastructure, DeepSeek.
- related: Matt Pottinger, Stewart Baker, David Feith.