Both devices were banned because they contain the HiSilicon Hi3516CV610 UHD Smart Vision SoC, a chip for surveillance and camera products made by a Huawei subsidiary. HiSilicon and its parent sit on the FCC's Covered List of entities deemed a risk to US national security. The chip is designed for uses such as vehicle dashcams and wireless CCTV systems, and packs WiFi, Ethernet, video encoding, an Arm Cortex-A7 core and an NPU, a neural processing unit that handles AI features.

That NPU is what drew the FCC's attention. According to the chip's datasheet, its Intelligent Video Engine runs a built-in multimodal large model with transformer feature acceleration, which tracks relationships between objects across video frames, including pets, faces, human figures and parcels. The FCC's concern is that such logic-bearing AI components from Covered List entities could be used to survey US citizens and log faces for foreign surveillance. Huawei has previously faced US restrictions, including a reported episode in which shell companies were allegedly used to obtain AI chips from TSMC against US supply limits.