Sovereignty incidents — hardware, export controls, supply chain
Biden AI Diffusion Rule / Trump rescission (15 January → 13 May 2025)
Claim
The Biden administration issued the “AI Diffusion Rule” on 15 January 2025 (published in the Federal Register), set to take effect on 15 May 2025. The rule sorted the world into three tiers and capped each country’s imports of advanced chips. On 13 May 2025, two days before it would have kicked in, the Trump administration’s Commerce Department Bureau of Industry and Security (BIS) scrapped it, with Under Secretary Jeffrey Kessler telling BIS enforcement staff not to apply it. At the same time, BIS put out three new guidance documents — on controlling advanced-computing chips, on training AI for weapons-of-mass-destruction uses, and on tactics used to dodge supply-chain controls.
Sources
- US Department of Commerce, BIS, “Department of Commerce Rescinds Biden-Era Artificial Intelligence Diffusion Rule,” 13 May 2025 ↗
- Becca Szkutak, “Trump administration officially rescinds Biden’s AI diffusion rules,” TechCrunch, 13 May 2025 ↗
Referenced in
- Framework §2
- AI-SAF-N Hardware pillar
- AI-SAF-N Regulatory pillar
- Refining §3.4