White House Adviser Expects Chip Control Clarity in ‘Next Few Months’
Although there remains a “contentious” debate around how exactly the U.S. should impose export controls on high-end AI chips, White House adviser Jacob Helberg said he believes the Trump administration will find a way to restrict the most sensitive technologies while still making sure the rest of the world relies on AI hardware, software and models exported from the U.S., not from China. Helberg said he expects the administration to provide clearer answers in the coming months.
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“Ultimately, the export control debate remains a heated one,” Helberg said during an event this week hosted by the Atlantic Council. “But there's clearly a way to thread this needle, which the administration will likely roll out in the next few months.”
Helberg, who is also awaiting Senate confirmation for a State Department role (see 2506180031), said there’s a “really big debate going on” about how the U.S. can strike the “right balance” between controlling advanced AI chips while also promoting U.S. AI exports, as outlined in Trump’s July executive order aimed at boosting American exports of AI technologies and services (see 2507240019). The Bureau of Industry and Security has announced plans to rescind and replace the Biden-era AI diffusion rule that set global export license requirements over advanced AI chips, but it remains unclear how long that effort will take or what the replacement regulations will look like (see 2507270003 and 2509040038).
Helberg didn’t give details about how chip controls will change, only saying that a debate is ongoing.
“Ultimately, most chips are not actually subject to export controls,” Helberg said. “So the debate focuses on, how do you calibrate national security concerns over our most prized technology with the competing goal of making sure that the rest of the world builds on top of the stack, so to speak?”
He said the administration is focused on promoting U.S. AI exports to friendly trading partners to make sure those countries and their firms build their AI ecosystems “on top of the American stack.”
If other countries aren’t using American AI technologies, Helberg said, they may turn to China. He pointed to China’s use of Huawei to offer 5G services around the world, adding that the U.S. had to “spend billions of dollars and an enormous amount of diplomatic capital to go around the world and convince other countries to not use Chinese 5G,” which was cheaper than foreign alternatives.
“It's a really big problem if you're talking about a Chinese company, which has direct ties to the [People’s Liberation Army] and is an instrument of the Chinese Communist Party, which is obviously the case for Huawei,” Helberg said.
Boosting exports of American AI technology means exporting certain Nvidia chips, Helberg said. Trump administration officials have said the White House is O.K. allowing Nvidia to export its H20 chips to China -- in exchange for a 15% fee from all sales revenue -- because those chips aren’t “state-of-the-art” and China may already have equivalent chips (see 2507160046). But lawmakers, former national security officials and industry observers have called on the administration to reverse that decision, saying they risk advancing China’s AI capabilities and threatening U.S. national and economic security.
Lawmakers also have criticized U.S. AI partnership agreements with Gulf nations, including the United Arab Emirates, saying they lack adequate measures to prevent U.S. adversaries from accessing advanced American chips (see 2505160049 and 2505190041).
“One of the reasons why you're seeing the debate on export control play out so contentiously is because people, I think, intuitively understand that these technologies are fundamentally dual-use,” Helberg said. “And that's why there's a big debate.”
But there is “no contentious debate around exporting open-source models and exporting even closed-source models,” he added. “We want the rest of the world to use American models. And so from that standpoint, there's a great deal of consensus on the fact that we need to do a better job at promoting American companies overseas.”