GoKawiilFor a policy designed to decide concretely who gets access to the world’s most powerful AI chips, Washington has produced a hell of a lot of uncertainty.
The Biden administration’s Framework for Artificial Intelligence Diffusion was published in January 2025 and was meant to come into force on May 15 that year. But just before that deadline, the Trump administration said it would rescind the rule, ordered officials not to enforce it, promised a replacement, then spent months gesturing at a new framework without actually delivering one. In March this year, yet another planned replacement rule was pulled back.
Chris McGuire, senior fellow for China and emerging technologies at the Council on Foreign Relations — and a former deputy senior director for technology and national security at the US National Security Council between 2022 and 2024 — put it succinctly in an interview with Tom’s Hardware Premium: “The administration has a contradictory policy on this.” So what’s going on?
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AI diffusion rules sit at the heart of the 21st-century power struggle over who gets access to advanced computing, who gets to build frontier AI systems, and how much leverage the U.S. can exert over allies, partners, and rivals. The existence of the rules is meant to improve national security by stopping advanced chips and model capabilities from flowing to adversaries while keeping the U.S. and its closest partners ahead. But in practice, businesses, foreign governments, and analysts have had to develop a sense of strategic improvisation.
The Trump administration is just simply not enforcing the AI diffusion rule. Kevin J Wolf, former assistant secretary of commerce for export administration
Kevin J Wolf, a veteran export controls lawyer at Akin Gump, who previously served as assistant secretary of commerce for export administration in the U.S. government, told Tom’s Hardware Premium that “the Trump administration is just simply not enforcing, as a practical matter, the AI diffusion rule.”
But Wolf drew a distinction between practical and legal enforcement. Export controls usually derive a lot of their force from what is written into the Federal Register, as well as the predictability of the process surrounding those rules.
Companies make billion-dollar investment decisions because they believe Washington, however slow or frustratingly it moves, is coherent. Wolf believes this coherence has broken down. That’s down to the departure of subject matter experts from the White House with the change of administration. “The AI experts, the chip experts, and the tool experts, they were all fired or quit early last year.”
Uncertainty in continuity
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