Washington – The White House announced today an Export Control Framework for AI Diffusion, establishing country-specific caps and a licensing regime for the U.S. export of advanced semiconductors critical for the development of AI. The rule will begin coming into effect within 120 days, and would significantly affect the ability of U.S. firms to deploy advanced semiconductors in data centers abroad.
The Computer & Communications Industry Association joined four other trade associations in December in a letter to the Biden administration highlighting concern over the rule’s purported content and its rushed nature. By capping the sale and deployment of advanced chips to most countries, including key partners, and by implementing stringent requirements on U.S. cloud service providers and data centers, the rule would likely hamper U.S. firms’ global competitiveness and could advantage the very rivals that the rule intends to constrain.
The repercussions would be widespread throughout both U.S. and trade partner industries reliant on quickly-innovating AI services reliant on advanced computing such as drug development, search, entertainment, gaming, and other cloud services.
CCIA has advocated on balancing trade and export control issues for over 50 years.
The following can be attributed to CCIA Vice President for Digital Trade Jonathan McHale:
“Exports of advanced technologies, particularly to adversary nations, raise legitimate national security issues. But this novel effort to broadly reshape the development of technology and services affects products and services widely used among many allies and partners, undermining a key source of U.S. competitiveness. Making it hard to deploy such products and services may incentivize adversaries and other competitors to fill the gap, inadvertently impairing U.S. national security.
“This complex and highly-prescriptive interim final rule was developed without any formal notice and comment procedures with outside stakeholders, precluding substantive analysis of the implications of the measure. Rushing out a consequential rule in the final week of an administration without that transparency does a disservice to both policymaking and affected stakeholders. Accordingly, we look to the incoming administration to carefully review both the substance and process of this outcome.”
