FCC Bans Devices Over Huawei Chip Inside

The Federal Communications Commission blocked two consumer gadgets from US shelves this week, and the first products caught were a dashboard camera and a wireless video transmitter. The agency acted under a rule it adopted recently that allows bans based on the chips inside a product rather than the brand or model name printed on its case.

The two devices contain a HiSilicon Smart Vision system on a chip. HiSilicon is a subsidiary of Huawei, which appears with its subsidiaries on the FCC's Covered List of entities considered a risk to US national security. The rule targets the silicon itself, so a ban no longer has to follow each product or label.

The chip at issue is the Hi3516CV610 UHD Smart Vision, built for surveillance and camera products including vehicle dashcams and wireless CCTV systems. It combines WiFi, Ethernet, video encoding hardware, an Arm Cortex-A7 processor, and a neural processing unit for AI functions. The FCC describes that neural processing unit as a device containing logic-bearing "smart" components made by entities on the Covered List.

According to the chip's data sheet, its Intelligent Video Engine runs on the neural processing unit and uses a built-in dedicated multimodal large model with transformer feature acceleration. The system tracks relationships between objects from one video frame to the next, holding attention on pets, faces, human figures, and parcels. A camera could thus tell a pet escaping from an unknown person taking a parcel a courier left. The FCC reads the same capability as a tool for surveying US citizens and logging faces for foreign surveillance.

The new approach is meant to close a gap in which rebranded products carrying parts from Chinese manufacturers named on US export restriction lists could still reach the market. Huawei has been tied to an AI chip controversy before: the company used shell companies to get TSMC to manufacture AI chips for it, despite a US request that TSMC stop supplying a list of Chinese customers. That episode sits among several Huawei controversies that led to other product bans in the United States.

Reader comments on the original report were mixed. Some called the move protectionism or questioned whether American surveillance differs from foreign surveillance. Others asked whether the FCC's authority covers only wireless devices; one commenter pointed to the Communications Act of 1934, which directs the agency to protect both wired and wireless interstate and international communications. Another argued bans should have been based on silicon from the start, given how many revisions and regional variants one product can have.