A bipartisan group of United States senators, including prominent Republican China hawk Tom Cotton, has unveiled a bill that would block the administration of President Donald Trump from loosening rules restricting Beijing’s access to artificial intelligence chips for 2.5 years.

The bill, unveiled on Thursday, is known as the SAFE CHIPS Act and was filed by Republican Senator Pete Ricketts and Democrat Chris Coons.

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It would require the Commerce Department, which oversees export controls, to deny any licence requests for buyers in China, Russia, Iran or North Korea to receive US AI chips more advanced than the ones they currently are allowed to obtain for 30 months. After that, the Department of Commerce would have to brief Congress on any proposed rule changes a month before they take effect.

“Denying Beijing access to [the best US] AI chips is essential to our national security,” Ricketts said in a statement.

The legislation, which was co-sponsored by Republican Dave McCormick and Democrats Jeanne Shaheen and Andy Kim, represents a rare effort led in part by Trump’s own party to stop him from further relaxing tech export restrictions on China.

Faced with new Chinese export curbs on the rare earth metals that global tech companies rely on, Trump’s Commerce Department imposed and then rolled back curbs on Nvidia’s H20 AI chips, a move that was criticised by Republican Representative John Moolenaar, who chairs the House Select Committee on China.

As part of negotiations with China to delay its own rare earth controls, Trump pushed back by a year a rule to restrict US tech exports to units of already-blacklisted Chinese companies and has pledged to nix a Biden-era rule restricting AI chip exports globally to countries based in part on concerns around chip smuggling to China.

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The bill comes as the Trump administration mulls greenlighting sales of Nvidia’s H200 artificial intelligence chips to China. China hawks in Washington fear that Beijing could use the prized chips to supercharge its military with AI-powered weapons and more powerful intelligence and surveillance capabilities.