The fundamental question is not whether America should control its most powerful technologies, but how much power Washington should wield in doing so. On this point, the Trump administration's emerging approach to AI export controls reveals a troubling irony: whilst denouncing the Biden-era framework as overreaching, it is constructing something potentially far more restrictive.
According to reporting from Tom's Hardware and other outlets,the U.S. Department of Commerce confirmed that the U.S. government is looking to change AI hardware export rules. More specifically,the officials confirmed that the U.S. DoC is looking to formalise an approach under which buyers of large quantities of AI accelerators must invest in U.S. AI infrastructure to obtain their hardware.
The proposed framework operates in tiers.The newly proposed export rules introduce a multi-level licensing structure tied to computing capacity. Smaller shipments of up to 1,000 Nvidia GB300 GPUs would undergo an expedited approval process; medium-scale deployments would need to secure pre-authorisation from the U.S. Department of Commerce before applying for export licence as well as operational transparency, disclosure of business activities, and potential on-site inspections by U.S. authorities. Beyond that scale,large-scale AI clusters would require governments of host countries to negotiate the deal with the U.S. government and investments in the U.S. AI infrastructure as part of the deal.
What makes this approach remarkable is its scope. Unlike previous controls targeted at specific adversaries, the new regime would apply worldwide, even affecting close allies.If the new regulation is enacted, anything above 1,000 GB300 would be subject to pre-authorisation before export licences could be issued, which includes shipments to 18 allied nations. The terms attached to such licences are particularly striking.The terms attached to recent export licences allowing Cerebras and Nvidia to supply hardware to the United Arab Emirates included a requirement that the Middle Eastern country invest one dollar in U.S. AI infrastructure for every dollar spent on its own domestic AI buildouts. If the same terms were to be attached to export licences to other countries, then this would make hardware from AMD, Cerebras, Nvidia, and other suppliers of AI accelerators 2X more expensive for companies in these countries.
The Commerce Department is at pains to distinguish this from the Biden administration's rejected AI Diffusion Rule.The U.S. DoC shot down claims of a return to anything resembling the AI Diffusion Rule from the Joe Biden era: "Today there was reporting that we were returning to the AI diffusion rule," the statement reads. "We will not. It was burdensome, overreaching, and disastrous." Yet the distinction may be semantic. The Biden framework,would have created a three-tiered system of export controls, with different levels of export controls and licensing requirements for each category of countries based on their risk level. The Trump approach appears to broaden the reach by making even friendly nations subject to preclearance requirements and adding investment mandates that the Biden rule did not include.
Consider the counterargument with intellectual honesty. Proponents of strict export controls face a genuine strategic logic.Proponents of the short-term AI-advancement scenario argue that truly transformative AI capabilities are imminent. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has suggested that "super powerful AI" could emerge by 2026-27, providing whichever nation possesses it with significant military advantages. This prediction is used to justify maintaining strong export controls to ensure the United States and its democratic allies maintain their lead during this critical window. If transformative AI does arrive within years rather than decades, restricting China's access to chips today could prove decisive. Fiscal conservatives and national security hawks can defend this position on rational grounds.
The scepticism runs deeper, though. Strip away the talking points and what remains is a global licensing regime that hands Washington unprecedented power to shape international AI infrastructure.President Donald Trump's team has said repeatedly that they want the world to use American AI, and the draft rules aren't meant to function as an Nvidia export ban. Rather, the regulation would set up the US government as gatekeeper for the AI industry: Companies and in some cases, their governments would have to seek the blessing of the US Commerce Department to buy the precious accelerators. That is industrial policy dressed in national security language, and it carries risks.
History suggests that export controls, even well intentioned ones, can backfire.Those who foresee a longer timeline for transformative AI argue that export controls could be counterproductive. Ben Thompson contends that denying China access to advanced chips primarily serves to sew "the seeds for competition in an industry — chips and semiconductor equipment — over which the U.S. has a dominant position." If transformative AI remains a decade away, the current restrictions may simply accelerate China's domestic chip development whilst depriving American companies of revenue and market share.
This is not a left-right issue; it is a competence issue. The Trump administration is right to abandon the Biden Diffusion Rule; it was genuinely complex and poorly calibrated. Yet the replacement being drafted may prove worse. A pragmatic policy would distinguish sharply between genuine adversaries and allies, maintain export controls on sensitive end-uses without trying to tax foreign investment in American infrastructure, and build international consensus rather than imposing unilateral diktat. Most importantly, it would rest on a clear-eyed assessment of the timeline for transformative AI and a willingness to acknowledge uncertainty rather than certainty. The government may yet get this right. The current trajectory suggests otherwise.