Trump’s Illegal AI Chip Export Controls, and Who Can Challenge Them

The Trump administration is taxing chip exports without congressional authorization. In August 2025, President Trump announced he would grant Nvidia export licenses to sell its H20 chips to China, on the condition that the company pay 15 percent of its revenues from those sales to the U.S. government. Trump announced he was extending the approach in December 2025: 25 percent for Nvidia’s advanced H200 chips, with similar arrangements for AMD and Intel. On Jan. 14, Trump formally imposed the 25 percent tax via proclamation. Revenue-for-access is now the administration’s export control policy for advanced artificial intelligence (AI) chips.

This is illegal. The Export Control Reform Act (ECRA) expressly prohibits the Bureau of Industry and Security (BIS) from charging any “fee” in connection with issuing export licenses, and a percentage of sales revenue is a “fee” under ECRA. More fundamentally, conditioning market access on payments to the federal treasury is taxation, a power that belongs exclusively to Congress. The executive cannot impose new taxes without congressional authorization, no matter what it calls the taxes. The revenue sharing conditions may also violate the Constitution’s Export Clause, which prohibits any “Tax or Duty” on exports.

The good news is that companies and customers in the AI supply chain have standing to challenge the revenue sharing conditions. Trump’s statements suggest that the licenses would not have…