The Trump administration hopes that AI technology will be seen as an industry leader both in-home soil and overseas. But it also does not want US AI capabilities to empower or burn foreign enemies.
That's quite a balance.
If President Trump's AI Action Plan released on Wednesday is any indicator, the administration appears to be still thinking of a proper course of action to achieve those goals.
“Currently, the US is a global leader in data center construction, hardware performance and model computing,” the plan says. “It is essential that the US will use this advantage to a permanent global alliance while preventing its adversaries from riding their innovation and investment freely.”
The plan mentions strengthening AI chip export control through a “creative approach” and strengthening one subsequent policy recommendation.
The initial call to government agencies, including the Commerce Department and the National Security Council, calls for cooperation with the AI industry on CHIP's location verification capabilities. The second is a recommendation to establish efforts to grasp the enforcement of potential chip export restrictions. In particular, it notes that the US and its allies impose export controls on the major systems needed to manufacture chips, but not focusing on many component subsystems.
The AI Action Plan also speaks of how the US needs to find coordination with global allies in the region.
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“The US must impose strong export controls on sensitive technologies,” the plan says. “We need to encourage partners and allies to follow US control, not backfill. If so, the US should achieve greater international alignment using tools such as foreign direct product rules and secondary tariffs.”
The AI Action Plan does not detail how to achieve the AL global partnership, coordinate with allies on export chip restrictions, or collaborate with US-based AI companies on chip location verification capabilities. Instead, the AI Action Plan lays out the basic building blocks needed for future sustainable AI chip export guidelines, as opposed to policies implemented in addition to existing guidelines.
Upshot: Chip export limits take longer. And there's ample evidence to propose it beyond the AI action plan. For example, the Trump administration has been contradictory over and over the past few months, including last week.
In July, the administration provided semiconductor companies like Nvidia and AMD with greenlight to begin selling AI chips developed for China, just months after rolling out the same AI chip licensing restrictions that effectively pulled NVIDIA from the Chinese market.
The administration also officially retracted the Biden administration's AI proliferation rules in May, which set a cap on AI computing capabilities that some countries were allowed to purchase.
The Trump administration is expected to sign multiple executive orders on July 23rd. It is unclear whether these include detailed plans on how to reach your goal.
The AI Action Plan speaks at length about understanding how to expand the US AI market globally while maintaining its advantage, but it's light to the details. The executive order on chip export restrictions, in contrast to formal guidelines, could be about collecting appropriate government sectors and figuring out the path forward.