Issue Brief: The Stop Stealing Our Chips Act — Institute for AI Policy and Strategy

[0](https://www.iaps.ai/cart)

# Issue Brief: The Stop Stealing Our Chips Act

Feb 9, 2026

Written By [Erich Grunewald](https://www.iaps.ai/research?author=65135a8bb50a7606abee0ea1)

[Read the Issue Brief](https://www.iaps.ai/s/Issue-Brief_-The-Stop-Stealing-Our-Chips-Act.pdf)

**The** [**Stop Stealing Our Chips Act**](https://kean.house.gov/sites/evo-subsites/kean.house.gov/files/evo-media-document/stop-stealing-our-chips-act-kean-final.pdf) **(SSOCA) is a bipartisan, bicameral bill introduced in 2025 that would authorize a new Bureau of Industry and Security (BIS) program to strengthen export enforcement by financially rewarding individuals who report export violations to US authorities**. Funded through penalties imposed on violators, the program is likely to pay for itself by generating new penalties. It is modeled on the Securities and Exchange Commission's (SEC) Whistleblower Program for violations of federal securities laws, which [has helped to generate](https://kkc.com/frequently-asked-questions/sec-whistleblower-program/) over $6bn in penalties over the past decade.

**The problem: BIS’s ability to enforce its export controls is seriously lacking, putting at risk the US compute advantage over China.** In the past two years:

- Huawei [obtained over 2.9mn AI chip dies](https://newsletter.semianalysis.com/p/huawei-ascend-production-ramp) from TSMC through front companies, despite sanctions. With these, Huawei could make more than 1mn Ascend 910C accelerators, far more than China’s domestic fabrication plants could supply at the time.

- Huawei and others [may have illegally obtained](https://semianalysis.com/2025/04/16/huawei-ai-cloudmatrix-384-chinas-answer-to-nvidia-gb200-nvl72/) high-bandwidth memory—another [key bottleneck](https://ai-frontiers.org/articles/high-bandwidth-memory-critical-gaps-us-export-controls) for China’s efforts to produce AI chips domestically

- Chinese chip makers [likely used](https://newsletter.semianalysis.com/p/fab-whack-a-mole-chinese-companies) imported semiconductor manufacturing equipment for advanced-node fabrication, despite such use being prohibited

- Hundreds of thousands of advanced AI chips [were likely smuggled](https://www.cnas.org/publications/reports/countering-ai-chip-smuggling-has-become-a-national-security-priority) into China, totaling billions of dollars


**To improve export enforcement, BIS needs better information.** BIS and industry are largely in the dark about when and where diversion and other enforcement failures occur, who is responsible, and how widespread such activities are. For example, the enormous Huawei-TSMC violation was only discovered when an independent firm did a teardown of a Huawei chip and identified it as TSMC-fabricated.

**The SSOCA addresses this by having BIS pay rewards to anyone who reports export violations to US authorities.** The bill’s main features are:

- **Financial incentives.** Individuals who provide original information leading to penalties of mo

... (truncated, 15 KB total)