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The Biden administration today announced a bold and controversial new export control scheme designed to prevent advanced chips and artificial intelligence same models to end up in the hands of opponents like China.
The administration’s new “AI diffusion rule” divides the world into nations that are allowed relatively unlimited access to America’s most advanced AI silicon and algorithms, and those that require special licenses to access the technology . The rule, which will be enforced by the Commerce Department’s Bureau of Industry and Security, also seeks to limit the movement of the most powerful AI models for the first time.
“The United States leads the world in AI right now, both in AI development and AI chip design, and it’s critical that we keep it that way,” US Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo said earlier of today’s announcement.
The list of trusted nations are the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, Japan, France, Germany, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, Ireland, Italy, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Republic of Korea, Spain, Sweden and Taiwan.
Companies in other nations not subject to arms controls could get up to 1,700 of the latest AI chips without special permission, the rule says. They can ask for a special license to buy more chips, to build large-scale data centers with US technology, or to gain access to the “weights” of more powerful closed models made by US companies. Businesses will be required to have adequate physical and cyber security to obtain a license.
Supply chain activities, including chip design, manufacturing and storage, will be exempt from the rule. The rule also will not limit open source AI models like Meta’s Llama, says the administration.
Weapons-embarking nations like China, Iran and North Korea are already banned from getting advanced chips. The new rule will for the first time limit their access to advanced models.
“Semiconductors that power (AI) and model weights are, as we all know, a dual-use technology,” added Raimondo before the announcement. “They are used in many commercial applications, but they can also be used by our adversaries to run nuclear simulations, develop bioweapons, and advance their military.”
The rule is sure to raise controversy, however, because it can throttle the international sale of AI at a critical moment for the industry. It comes just a week before Donald Trump’s inauguration. The decision sets up a 120-day consultation period, meaning the Trump administration will be expected to listen to input, possibly modify the rule, and then implement it.
Nvidiau The world’s first AI chip makercalled the “unprecedented and wrong” rule in a blog post. “While resembling an ‘anti-China’ measure, these rules would do nothing to strengthen US security. Rather than mitigating any threat, Biden’s new rules will only weaken America’s global competitiveness, undermining the innovation that kept America going.”
The United States already limits exports of advanced AI chips to Chinaa key geopolitical rival, but companies there have been able to build cutting algorithms using computer clusters located in other nations. Under the new rule, China will not be able to build so-called frontier AI models in other nations affected by the rule.
