Panelist Hopes AI Action Plan Will Make AI Deals More 'Rule-Bound'
The success of the Trump administration's AI export plan depends on how fast the U.S. can export its AI technology around the world and whether the project allows the U.S. to strengthen relationships with allies, said Pablo Chavez, an adjunct senior fellow with the Center for a New American Security's Technology and National Security Program.
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During a Brookings Institution event this week about the AI action plan, Chavez said that "getting more projects done quickly is important," especially as it relates to competition with China. Trump earlier this year announced a new program to increase U.S. exports of AI technologies and services as part of an effort to spread the adoption of American AI systems around the world and keep allies from building AI systems on technology from U.S. adversaries, such as China (see 2507240019).
The administration should make sure its proposed full-stack AI export packages "actually result in strengthening relationships with partners and allies versus antagonizing them," Chavez said. Part of that should include moving away from ad-hoc deals with individual nations -- such as the administration's AI agreements with the United Arab Emirates and other Middle Eastern nations, announced earlier this year (see 2507090032) -- to "something that is more rule-bound and sustainable and transparent and predictable," he added. "It's critical in government, it's critical in business, it's critical in economic development. And so hopefully we'll move towards that."
Samm Sacks, a senior fellow with Yale Law School's Paul Tsai China Center, said she hopes the plan results in less trade "fragmentation" and a realization that countries must depend on one another for certain items.
"I want to make an unpopular case for a return to globalization," she said. "I think we have to accept interdependence in a clear-eyed way," and the AI action plan will be successful if "we sort of see an end to an isolationist, fractured ecosystem."
Sacks said there's a debate both in the U.S. and in China "about this concept of managed interdependence," especially around AI technologies and advanced semiconductors. "In seeking control over key nodes, what is the most effective way to do that to maintain maximum competitive advantage?" she asked. "I think that that is unresolved in both countries."
She pointed to the fact that there's disagreement over whether the U.S. should allow Nvidia to export its advanced H20 chips to China (see 2509260019). The administration argued that exporting the chips would help keep China dependent on American technology and give the U.S. a "strategic advantage," Sacks noted. But Beijing later reportedly ordered its top companies to stop buying Nvidia chips.
"So at the moment when the U.S. was ready to glom onto the idea that there was a strategic advantage in it, Beijing said, 'Nope, no thanks. I don't want that,'" she said.
There's still an open question about what will replace the Biden-era AI diffusion export control rule (see 2509230052), Sacks added. "We're still seeing a discussion of where to draw this line" and "how do we actually execute managed interdependence in a way that will maximize the objectives?"