“In its last days in office, the Biden Administration seeks to undermine America’s leadership with a 200+ page regulatory morass, drafted in secret and without proper legislative review. This sweeping overreach would impose bureaucratic control over how America’s leading semiconductors, computers, systems and even software are designed and marketed globally.”
US · FederalUS Department of Commerce (BIS)
BIS Framework for Artificial Intelligence Diffusion (interim final rule)
Issued January 15, 2025 in the closing days of the Biden administration: a three-tier global licensing framework for advanced AI chips and model weights. Opposed publicly by NVIDIA, Microsoft, and ITI; rescinded by the Trump administration on May 13, 2025 and replaced with diversion-focused guidance rather than country caps.
Rescinded May 13, 2025, two days before its compliance date; BIS issued replacement guidance on PRC chip diversion (incl. Huawei Ascend) and promised a successor rule; in Jan 2026 Commerce codified conditional NVIDIA H200 exports to Chinaas of 2025-05-13primary source ↗
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“Make it simpler. Stop relegating American friends and allies into a second tier that undermines their confidence in ongoing access to American products. Eliminate the quantitative caps that would interfere with a well-functioning economic market. And keep what matters most, such as the qualitative security standards and AI use restrictions that protect national security.”
“We advocate for tightening semiconductor export restrictions so as to ensure America and its allies can capitalize on the opportunities of powerful AI systems, and to prevent our adversaries from accessing the AI infrastructure that enables powerful AI. This includes controlling H20 chips, requiring government-to-government agreements for countries hosting large chip deployments, and reducing no-license-required thresholds.”
“We encourage the Trump Administration, and BIS in particular, to withdraw the Interim Final Rule (IFR) on a Framework for AI Diffusion and open a new, deliberative rulemaking process with stakeholders to protect national security without undermining U.S. companies’ of all sizes ability to compete globally.”
“Embedding backdoors and kill switches into chips would be a gift to hackers and hostile actors. It would undermine global digital infrastructure and fracture trust in U.S. technology.”
“a government chip tracking mandate would create the impression of deepening U.S. government control over the American AI stack, fueling questions about the security, reliability, and privacy of U.S. technology and pushing the very countries that should be core customers of U.S. providers toward alternatives”