A workable blueprint for a chip licensing regime
Our current export controls stop at the border. A chip that slips through leaves no record. It becomes shadow compute, and it forces American planners to assume the worst about Chinese capability instead of measuring it. Uncertainty speeds the race. The controls aren’t too strict or too loose. They’re too crude.
Every chip ships with a signed compute budget that counts down as the chip runs. Renewing it takes a cryptographic signature from an authorized party. No signature, no compute. From the next hardware generation onward, a smuggled chip is a brick. Rules vary by destination: allies and partners get metering only; restricted destinations get metering, cluster-size caps, and inference-only mode with periodic inspections. The chip never reports what you run: no models, no weights, no data.
The Commerce Department can break the deadlock by publishing a license exception under authority it already holds. Chips with certified hardware guarantees earn standing, streamlined export to markets now capped or reviewed one deal at a time. None of this needs new law or a vote in Congress. Regulators can write the rule in a few months. The first governed silicon ships in roughly three years, and coverage compounds with every generation after. Existing controls continue unchanged in the meantime.
Any future compute agreement lives or dies on verification: every FLOP traceable to a signed budget. This plan builds that accounting now, while it’s cheap, so the machinery exists when the moment arrives. It is the half of treaty verification the US can build without anyone’s permission.
The research exists. The legal authority exists. The technology doesn’t. That changes now.