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“These new requirements would have stifled American innovation
and saddled companies with burdensome new regulatory
requirements,” the Commerce Department stated in its guidance.
President Joe Biden established the export framework shortly
before he left office in an attempt to balance national security
concerns about the technology with the economic interests of
producers and other countries. While the United States had
already restricted exports to adversaries such as China and
Russia, some of those controls had loopholes and the rule would
have set limits on a much broader group of countries, including
Middle Eastern countries that President Donald Trump is visiting
this week.
The Biden rule's sorting more than 100 countries into different
tiers of export restrictions drew strong opposition from those
countries, as well as U.S. chipmakers like Nvidia and Advanced
Micro Devices. They argued the restrictions could actually push
some countries to turn to China instead of the U.S. for their AI
technology.
What Biden's rule did "was send a message to 120 nations that
they couldn’t necessarily count on us to provide the AI they
want and need,” said Brad Smith, Microsoft's president, at a
U.S. Senate hearing last week.
Commerce Undersecretary Jeffery Kessler said Tuesday that
President Donald Trump's administration will work to replace the
now-rescinded rule to pursue AI with "trusted foreign countries
around the world, while keeping the technology out of the hands
of our adversaries." The administration said a replacement rule
is coming in the future but hasn't said what the new rule will
say.
The European Commission welcomed the change, said spokesperson
Thomas Regnier, arguing that the Biden rule, if it took effect,
would "undermine U.S. diplomatic relations with dozens of
countries by downgrading them to second-tier status.”
European Union countries should be able to buy advanced AI chips
from the U.S. without limitations, Regnier said.
“We cooperate closely, in particular in the field of security,
and represent an economic opportunity for the U.S., not a
security risk,” he said in a statement.
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