Alasdair Phillips-Robins and Sam Winter-Levy
The Technology and International Affairs Program develops insights to address the governance challenges and large-scale risks of new technologies. Our experts identify actionable best practices and incentives for industry and government leaders on artificial intelligence, cyber threats, cloud security, countering influence operations, reducing the risk of biotechnologies, and ensuring global digital inclusion.Learn More
One of the final actions of president Joe Biden’s administration was to publish the “AI diffusion rule,” a complex regulation governing the export of advanced computing chips to most countries in the world. President Donald Trump’s administration has signaled that it intends to repeal the rule, which is set to come into force on May 15, and replace it with a simpler framework to regulate the export of AI technology, although the administration has reportedly not reached a final decision.
The existing rule seeks to regulate the sale of the world’s most powerful AI chips and the storage of advanced AI model weights (the parameters that encode a system’s core intelligence) in every country in the world. It does so by splitting the world into three groups: a small set of close U.S. allies to which almost no restrictions apply; a group of arms-embargoed countries, including China and Russia, that were already banned from receiving U.S. chips; and a large middle category where most shipments can proceed but those necessary to build very large computing clusters are subjected to additional scrutiny or, at the largest levels, banned entirely.
The rule’s designers were attempting to balance the need to preserve U.S. control over powerful AI systems against the importance of promoting exports of U.S. AI products and services abroad. Their solution was to try to ensure that the largest computing clusters and the most powerful AI systems remained in the United States and a small group of close allies, while allowing the vast majority of commercial activity to carry on largely unimpeded. At the same time, they created a framework for using AI exports as leverage over geopolitical swing states, establishing incentives for other governments to adopt U.S. technology standards and protections in exchange for U.S. chips. In other words, the rule was a compromise between what one of this article’s authors has elsewhere described as three possible goals of international AI policy: control, promotion, and leverage.
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