Closing the Remote Access Loop

As Asad Ramzanali argues in “Why the Cloud Needs Competition” (Issues, Winter 2026), cloud computing has become critical infrastructure for everyday American life and national security. It is also the primary platform on which frontier artificial intelligence, the leading edge of AI capability, is built and trained—and therefore central to US-China competition and securing American AI leadership. It’s time for the US government to govern it accordingly by addressing a glaring gap: the lack of appropriate oversight into operations on the cloud relevant to national security.

Among the cloud’s many critical applications, none is more consequential than AI. Whoever leads in frontier AI shapes economic power, military capability, and whether defining norms are set by democracies or autocracies. The cloud is the primary platform on which frontier AI is built and trained. Yet the government lacks visibility into what happens on commercial cloud infrastructure. Cloud providers have no binding obligation to verify their customers or share that information with the government. Although it is likely that providers collect some customer information, particularly at large compute scales, this constitutes informal awareness and is insufficient compared with a structured verification and reporting regime.

Chinese entities have exploited this gap, quietly accessing American cloud infrastructure to run AI workloads on chips they are banned from purchasing directly, undermining the export controls that represent the United States’ greatest lever in maintaining its leadership in AI. One case involving Chinese government-linked Shenzhen University, which remotely accessed Nvidia A100 and H100 chips via Amazon Web Services, was discovered only when Reuters journalists combed through Chinese procurement documents.

A know-your-customer (KYC) regime, as Ramzanali proposes, would address the lack of oversight into commercial cloud activity. Requiring cloud providers to verify who is accessing their infrastructure and report that information to federal authorities would close the gap that allowed Chinese entities to access restricted compute undetected. Such a regime has strong bipartisan support, having already been proposed by both the Trump and Biden administrations.

Congress is making progress on closing the remote access loop. The Remote Access Security Act, which broadens compute export controls to include remote access through the cloud, recently passed the House and is under active consideration by the Senate. However, success requires implementation of an effective KYC regime. If the bill passes, cloud providers would have to ensure that they’re not providing services to entities of concern—and a strong KYC program is the starting point for fulfilling the requirement.

Critics may argue that the government shouldn’t have oversight into private cloud operations, and that doing so may constitute widespread surveillance. But KYC wouldn’t give the government visibility into the private content of cloud users. It would simply require cloud providers to collect and verify customer information—formalizing what providers already do in certain cases—and share it with the government. This is common practice in the financial sector, where banks are required to collect customer information and flag suspicious activity to federal authorities—without these requirements constituting surveillance of customers’ finances.

The stakes are high. US cloud infrastructure could be supplying the missing puzzle piece for compute-constrained China to fulfill its AI ambitions. This would threaten economic security, as China erodes America’s AI lead, as well as national security, as advances in civil technologies feed directly into advances in military technologies.

As Ramzanali warns, the window to act is narrowing—and not only because the cloud market is ossifying. Every day the United States fails to close the door to China’s access to American compute is a day we risk China developing the AI capabilities that threaten US national security.

Michelle Nie