It is easier then smuggling drugs because US is not making it difficult to sidestep the sanctions. Hey, this random house in Delaware is buying a ton of GPUs, should we investigate? Nah, our donors don’t actually want Nvidia stock to go down so ignore it.

I don’t think the root problem is political corruption or donors.

If anything, the hundreds of millions of dollars from AI lobbyists would overwhelmingly support anything that would prevent anyone outside of the US getting their hands on computer chips.

The AI lobby in support of banning export of chips is way greater than anyone lobbying the opposite.

> should we investigate? Nah, our donors […]

The US government is a very slow moving bureaucracy. Slower to adapt than the slowest moving large public company.

The GPU chip issue came about suddenly, out of the blue, and caught the government unprepared. When that happens, it typically takes government years to catch up and figure out how to adapt.

Even in cases where incentives are aligned in favor of the government’s position, they still take forever to roll out meaningful change with effective enforcement - e.g. charging sales tax on software business, remember that Supreme Court case years ago? Or remember all the concern about engineer salaries being de-categorized as R&D? These are examples that are legally decided but gov is incredibly slow to enforce. The Wayfair supreme court case was back in 2018, right? Many years later, most SaaS companies are still getting away with not charging sales tax. Certain states are just now stating to enforce, 7 years later.

Investigate and do what? It's not illegal to buy GPUs, the sanctions have no power in this space. Who could a law even hurt here, the seller who is a single individual? If they made it illegal to individually export them out of the US the Chinese could just buy them somewhere else.