Industry Official: US Agencies to Meet Next Month About AI Diffusion, Chip Controls
The Trump administration plans to convene early next year to try to better organize its approach to AI diffusion and export controls over AI semiconductors, said Paul Triolo, the technology policy lead at advisory firm Albright Stonebridge Group.
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On an episode of the Sinica podcast released last week, Triolo said he believes Secretary of State and National Security Adviser Marco Rubio will lead a new interagency group beginning in January that will “look at the AI diffusion problem,” which has “become so messy over the last year.”
“There's a sense that, OK, there needs to be a more orderly process to decide who gets licenses to ship [graphics processing units] to the Middle East, to Saudi Arabia and the” United Arab Emirates, Triolo said. “And I think, as part of that, maybe there will be included in that discussion a sort of rethink around China and GPUs in China.” He added that there's currently “no clarity in terms of what the new policy is.”
The Bureau of Industry and Security announced plans in May to repeal and eventually replace the Biden-era AI diffusion rule, which set global export license requirements on a range of AI chips (see 2505130018). The administration hasn’t yet done so, which some exporters and trade lawyers said has caused uncertainty (see 2506110027 and 2506110008).
Instead, President Donald Trump has at various times over the past year announced plans to allow certain exports of Nvidia chips to China, including most recently shipments of H200s (see 2512080059). Trump also has hinted at potentially allowing a downgraded version of Nvidia’s advanced Blackwell chip to be exported to China (see 2512100030 and 2511030031), although Triolo said that timeline also is unclear.
“When does that Blackwell architecture become available to sell to China? Is it 18 months? Is it 24 months? Is it four years? Nobody knows,” he said. “There's been no discussion of that at any sort of policy level that means anything.”
But Triolo said he believes that could change in “early 2026.”
“There is sort of the sense that there needs to be some order returned to this issue, because otherwise you're going to have people like [Nvidia CEO] Jensen [Huang] lobbying Trump and Mar-a-Lago and the White House, and the China hawks and the export control proponents pushing back on this,” he said. “It's kind of a disorderly process, because there is no policy. And so there will be an attempt, I think, to impose some new policy regime around this in the first quarter or second quarter of 2026.”
“But, again, who the players are and how that comes up is tricky.”
A State Department spokesperson didn't comment. The White House and Commerce Department didn’t respond to requests for comment.
As an example of the disorder, Triolo pointed to the fact that Trump announced that the U.S. would be approving the H200 exports through a post on Truth Social.
“We are in this sort of disorderly state here, where the policy processes are not clear, the interagency processes are not clear, and everything goes to the White House, and that tends to be the only thing that matters, as we saw from the Truth Social post,” Triolo said. “I mean, can you imagine having policy in the Biden era determined by a tweet from Joe Biden? It’s inconceivable.”