Washington: Depending on who’s talking, the outgoing Biden administration’s recently announced “Interim Final Rule” regulating high-tech exports will either protect America’s lead in AI tech from Chinese copycats or cripple the American AI industry by ceding the global market to China.
Publicly announced after months of build-up and debate, the new rule divides the world into three zones with varying levels of access to US tech. It’s an attempt to simplify routine exports of high-powered chips while simultaneously closing loopholes that China and other adversaries could exploit to steal cutting-edge AI components and know-how.
“We have a national security responsibility to do two things,” National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan told reporters. “First, to preserve, protect and extend American AI leadership, particularly vis a vis strategic competitors; and second, ensure that the benefits of American AI are spread to people around the world, including the global build-out of data centres to run AI applications.”
Critics, however, say this will all backfire horrifically. They argue the rule will tie US exports up in regulatory knots so tight they won’t be able to compete for sales with China, whose industry will then get to dominate the international market in AI. That’s arguably how Chinese drones flooded the globe after the US limited exports of unmanned aircraft technology.
The draft AI rule “will go down as one of the most destructive to ever hit the US technology industry,” Oracle VP Ken Glueck seethed in a January 5 blog post, evidently having read a near-final draft. “[It’s] a highly complex and wildly overbroad attempt to regulate Artificial Intelligence and GPUs [that will] shrink the global chip market for US firms by 80 percent and hand it to the Chinese.” And as soon as the rule officially went public, the Information Technology & Innovation Foundation (ITIF) expressed “serious concerns”, the Semiconductor Industry Association said it was “deeply disappointed,” and leading chipmaker NVIDIA appealed directly to incoming President Trump.
“The first Trump Administration laid the foundation for America’s current strength and success in AI, fostering an environment where US industry could compete and win on merit without compromising national security,” NVIDIA government affairs chief Ned Finkle wrote. “In its last days in office, the Biden Administration seeks to undermine America’s leadership with a 200+ page regulatory morass.”
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