A former senior White House artificial intelligence adviser on Monday defended a controversial chip export policy that seeks to maintain the US lead in AI by limiting the ability of some countries to buy powerful semiconductors.
"If computing power is so fundamental to AI, and the US and our allies are at such an extraordinary advantage in the design, production and use of that computing power, then we should be careful where we send this," Ben Buchanan, who served in former president Joe Biden's administration, said during Johns Hopkins University’s 2025 Emerging Technologies symposium.
Those policies, known as the AI diffusion rule, placed countries into tiers in terms of who would be able to obtain highly sought-after CPUs and GPUs integral to AI infrastructure.
That policy was announced during the final days of the Biden administration and mostly aimed at keeping US AI technology out of the hands of adversarial countries like China and Russia.
Australia, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, South Korea, Spain, Sweden, Taiwan and the UK are the countries exempt from AI diffusion restrictions, falling into the first tier of AI diffusion countries.
The third tier of countries – China, Iran, North Korea, Russia, Syria and Venezuela – will have the most difficulty obtaining GPUs and CPUs under the new rules.
In the second tier, however, are countries such as Switzerland, Poland, Greece, Singapore, India, Indonesia, Israel, the UAE and Saudi Arabia.
US technology and AI heavyweights such as Microsoft and Nvidia have come out strongly against the rule.
“Left unchanged, the Biden rule will give China a strategic advantage in spreading over time its own AI technology, echoing its rapid ascent in 5G telecoms a decade ago,” Microsoft's president and vice chairman Brad Smith wrote on the company's AI blog in February.
Ned Finkle, vice president of government affairs at Nvidia, a maker of many of the chips affected by the AI diffusion policy, said the Biden administration sought to "undermine America’s leadership with a 200-plus-page regulatory morass, drafted in secret and without proper legislative review".
Both Nvidia and Microsoft have said that the policy could have unintended consequences by pushing countries to buy from China instead of the US.
Ultimately, the decision to change or withdraw the AI diffusion role rests with the US Department of Commerce.
In February, Mr Trump’s Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick was present during meetings between Nvidia’s chief executive Jensen Huang and the US President. And in March, the chip export policy was also the topic of various conversations with the Trump White House during a visit by UAE officials.
So far, however, no changes in AI diffusion rule have come to fruition. The National contacted the US Commerce Department for comment, but has not heard back.
The UAE has made significant investments in recent years in AI as it seeks to diversify its economy away from oil. A source at Nvidia previously told The National the chip export rules will make it harder for countries including the UAE to build capacity for non-frontier AI use cases.
Frontier AI is a term used to describe highly capable AI models and technology that could pose risks to public safety.
At the Emerging Technologies symposium, however, Mr Buchanan, who is now an assistant professor at Johns Hopkins' School of Advanced International Studies, denied that US technology companies like Nvidia were adversely affected by the chip export policies.
"The argument was that we were limiting who these US companies can sell these chips to and therefore limiting the revenue of these companies," he said.
"Nvidia's stock, prior to the tariffs at least, did very well and they've done just fine, because there's extraordinary demand for AI chips."
Mr Buchanan said worries about declining chip sales did not pan out.
Mr Buchanan said worries about declining chip sales did not eventuate. He said the Chinese semiconductor sector has not caught up with the US in terms of quality and processing power.
During a separate panel discussion at the emerging technology symposium, Eric Breckenfeld, Nvidia's director of technology policy, said the company made the most of a comment period announced by the Trump administration which is seeking to formulate an AI action plan for the country.
During that comment period, the White House urged citizens to “share their policy ideas” for AI.
The deadline for comments expired on March 15.
Meanwhile, much of the technology world is in wait and see mode to see if export policies get reversed.
