That bill will likely face industry pushback, CNBC suggested, since cloud providers would bear the cost of that new compliance regime, including implementing better know-your-customer protocols.

For the US, ending remote access may seem like an increasingly urgent priority, but the Supermicro scandal shows that evading controls can often be as easy as forging a document in an overburdened system where neither top executives nor customs officials managed to flag billions of dollars in fraudulent diversions.

However, the global crackdown on employees who are striking shady deals to export AI servers to China does come as Nvidia recently announced it’s increasing the prices of AI servers by 15 percent. So, at the very least, any employees motivated by the potential of gaining even higher profits from illicit sales will seemingly be on notice.

In her op-ed, Barden-Hair suggested that the US was blindsided by Chinese AI server smuggling because it failed to learn from its own history. In 1998, the Senate Committee on Governmental Affairs investigated “Chinagate,” a campaign finance scandal where China used Southeast Asian companies as a cover to try to influence election outcomes.

In that scheme, China learned that cultivating ties with business moguls—particularly those who had deep financial investments in China but were based just outside its sovereign territory—provided the “ideal cover,” Barden-Hair said. And similarly, the unnamed Southeast Asian firm at the heart of the Supermicro scandal appears to follow the same playbook, she said.

“It is easy to point out errors in judgment after a disaster, and US export control authorities deserve support and praise for their efforts to protect national security,” Barden-Hair said. “But it is important that we take the right lessons from the Supermicro scandal amid our shaming of the guilty, and remember the hard-earned lessons of the past. With the anonymous company the Justice Department refers to, China is showing us, again, that its pawns are scattered beyond its borders, and that its financial tentacles have a real and devastating influence.”