FCC Issues First Device Bans Under New Chip-Level Rule, Targeting Dashcam and Video Transmitter With Huawei-Linked Silicon

The US Federal Communications Commission has banned two consumer devices from sale and marketing in the United States for the first time under a recently adopted rule that lets the agency act on the basis of the chips inside a product rather than its brand or model name.

The two products are a dashboard camera and a wireless video transmitter. As reported by The Verge, both were blocked because they contain a HiSilicon Smart Vision system on a chip (SoC). HiSilicon is a subsidiary of Huawei, and Huawei and its subsidiaries appear on the FCC's Covered List of entities considered a risk to US national security.

The new approach is meant to close a loophole in which rebranded products that include parts from Chinese manufacturers named on US export restriction lists could continue to reach the market. Because the rule targets the silicon itself, a ban no longer has to follow each individual product or label.

The chip at issue is the Hi3516CV610 UHD Smart Vision, an SoC designed for surveillance and camera products such as vehicle dashcams and wireless CCTV systems. It combines WiFi, Ethernet, video encoding hardware, an Arm Cortex-A7 processor and a neural processing unit (NPU) for AI functions.

The NPU is the component that concerns the FCC. The agency describes it 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 NPU and uses a built-in dedicated multimodal large model along with transformer feature acceleration. This allows the AI to understand relationships between objects from one video frame to the next, maintaining "attention" on related subjects the data sheet lists as pets, faces, human figures and parcels. For consumers, that could mean a camera that distinguishes a pet escaping from an unknown person taking a parcel that a courier had left.

The FCC, however, believes the same logic-bearing AI could be used for something more troubling: surveying US citizens and logging faces for foreign surveillance.

Huawei has previously been tied to an AI chip controversy. It used shell companies to deceive TSMC into manufacturing AI chips for it, despite a US request that TSMC stop supplying a list of Chinese customers. That episode is one of several Huawei controversies that have led to other product bans in the United States.

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