US withdraws draft rule that called for permits for global AI chip exports

By Maggie Eastland

 

The US Commerce Department has pulled a draft regulation that would have restricted exports of artificial intelligence chips to anywhere in the world without US approval, according to an electronic notification posted on a government website. 

The Office of Management and Budget’s website changed on Friday to say that an interagency review process for the rule had concluded and that the measure had been withdrawn, without providing other details. 

 

A Trump administration official said late Friday that the now-withdrawn rule was a draft and that any discussions regarding the proposal were preliminary. Reuters reported on the withdrawal earlier Friday.

 

 

The draft rule was previously reported by Bloomberg News, with the caveat that it could change substantially or be shelved entirely. It had marked the Trump administration’s most substantive step toward a global chip export strategy after scrapping the regulatory approach it inherited from the Biden administration last year. 

 

In response to the Bloomberg report, the Commerce Department said last week that “we will not” return to the previous administration’s AI diffusion framework, which it called “burdensome, overreaching and disastrous.” 

 

The now-abandoned Trump administration proposal would have carved out a significant role for the Commerce Department’s licensing office to conduct case-by-case reviews of AI chip exports from Nvidia Corp. and Advanced Micro Devices Inc. 

 

Approvals would have been contingent on a range of factors, including government-to-government agreements and how much computing power each end user was seeking, Bloomberg reported.