On 22 October 2026 the Federal Communications Commission blocked two products from the US market: a wireless video transmitter and a dashboard camera. Both contain chips made by HiSilicon, a Huawei subsidiary on the FCC's Covered List. The Record reports this is the first use of rules that took effect on 13 October. Before then, agency rules did not bar "otherwise lawful devices" from containing parts made by Covered List entities. The FCC says HiSilicon markets the chips as "designed for the surveillance market" with built-in face-detection algorithms.
The case for the rule
The strongest argument for the FCC is that the old regime had an obvious gap. The Covered List exists because Congress told the FCC to publish a list of equipment that poses "an unacceptable risk to the national security of the United States." That mandate comes from the Secure and Trusted Communications Networks Act of 2019, enacted on 12 March 2020. A listed company that could not get a finished product authorized could still sell its silicon to a third-party assembler. That assembler's product would then clear review under a different brand. A face-detecting camera chip is the kind of component where the risk sits in the silicon, not the casing. Chairman Brendan Carr called such products potential spyware and said they pose "an obvious and unacceptable risk to the nation." If the underlying judgment about HiSilicon is right, a ban limited to finished goods was easy to evade.
The design of the rule also has real merit. In FCC 26-50, adopted on 22 July 2026, the Commission made the ban prospective. It does not touch equipment already authorized. Applications that were pending before the effective date are exempt. Only an amendment that adds or changes a logic-bearing component restarts the clock. That is a sensible transition, and it avoids a retroactive recall.
Where proportionality gets tested
The order defines a covered component as one that "generates and uses timing signals or pulses at a rate in excess of 9,000 pulses (cycles) per second" and "uses digital techniques." Purely mechanical and passive parts are excluded. As a policy judgment, this is wide. In our reading, nearly every modern microcontroller, memory chip and radio module clears a 9,000-cycle threshold. The rule is therefore broad in scope, and its narrowness comes from who counts as the producer, not from what counts as a component.
That producer test is a standard, not a bright line. The order says "produced by" "continues to be evaluated under the totality of the circumstances." For components, the prohibition applies if the Covered List entity, had it "produced the device itself," would have been barred. Totality tests give regulators flexibility. They also give device makers uncertainty, and that uncertainty falls hardest on small importers who cannot afford a compliance lawyer for every bill of materials line.
The Commission also declined to soften the rule. The order rejects requests for a safe harbor or a knowledge requirement, stating "We do not accept these requests." It does say it is unlikely to pursue a marketplace that conducts "reasonable due diligence." It acknowledges that the prohibitions "may impose compliance costs on device makers," but the portion of the order we could read contained no quantified estimate of those costs. A rule that reaches a whole class of components should come with a cost estimate, even a rough one.
The enforcement problem is information
Most applicants cannot easily say whose silicon is in a module they bought from a contract manufacturer. The FCC's press release points to the fix. The same item proposes expanded supply chain disclosures, and the order's further notice contemplates hardware and software bills of materials. These are proposals, not adopted rules. We support them in principle, because disclosure is a cheaper and more precise tool than a flat prohibition. Whether they stay narrow or turn into open-ended paperwork will decide how burdensome the regime becomes.
The order also puts new duties on online marketplaces. Platforms must, subject to limited exceptions, provide an FCC ID at the online point of sale. The press release says small sellers and used goods are exempt and that platforms need not verify FCC IDs supplied by third parties. It also credits an earlier effort, Operation Clean Carts, with the removal of more than 4 million devices from platforms. Those exemptions and the due-diligence language show the FCC trying to avoid making intermediaries insurers of every listing, and that restraint is welcome.
What to watch
Two cases do not tell us much about the rule's reach. They involve a chip vendor that markets itself for surveillance, which is the easiest possible target. The harder cases will involve general-purpose chips with ambiguous provenance, or a listed company's design manufactured elsewhere. Those will test the totality standard.
There are three things to track. First, whether the FCC publishes the reasoning behind each denial, so that manufacturers can learn from precedent instead of guessing. Second, whether the proposed bill-of-materials requirement is scoped to the components that matter. Third, whether the FCC grounds each Covered List entry in the statute's required determinations. The statute lets the list grow only on specified findings and requires removal when those findings lapse. A component-level ban makes each listing far more consequential, so the quality of the evidence behind each entry matters more than before.
The pro-innovation position does not require defending HiSilicon. It requires that a national-security rule be precise about its target, predictable for the many compliant firms, and backed by disclosure tools that let honest manufacturers prove their supply chain is clean. The first enforcement action meets that standard. The next several will show whether the rule does.