OpenAI Went Silent on China Chip Controls After Nvidia Deals

OpenAI stopped publicly supporting strict US chip export limits on China, reversing from its active lobbying in March 2025, when it pushed the White House to maintain strict controls and expand the list of restricted chips. By June 2026, OpenAI's policy framework omitted China by name. In October 2025, OpenAI asked the White House to loosen some export rules for AI safety testing. Congressional aides and lobbyists noticed the silence; China hawks in Congress had counted on OpenAI's backing for a planned lame-duck push to attach new chip restrictions to the defense spending bill. Nvidia, which lobbies against chip restrictions, is OpenAI's chip supplier, a $30 billion equity investor, and the guarantor of up to $105 billion for the first phase of an Ohio data center OpenAI will lease. No quid pro quo between the policy shift and the Nvidia financial arrangements has been reported. Anthropic took the opposing stance, publicly backing several chip restriction bills and leaving a major tech trade association in September 2025 over that association's efforts to reshape those bills.