US warns against using Huawei AI chips and lifts Biden export restrictions

The U.S. Commerce Department has issued a statement saying that the use of Ascend artificial intelligence chips from China's Huawei "anywhere in the world" violates government export controls. The new guidelines are intended to weaken China's technological development, Bloomberg reports.

The Bureau of Industry and Security, part of the Commerce Department, said it also plans to warn the public about the potential consequences if American AI chips are used to train and run Chinese language models.

The Commerce Department's new guidelines could further complicate Huawei's ambitions to develop powerful AI and smartphone chips, a move the Chinese company has already faced due to U.S. sanctions.

The bureau also released new guidance and announced its intention to review the Joe Biden administration's restrictions on the export of semiconductors used in AI development. These restrictions have previously drawn sharp criticism from both U.S. allies and companies like NVIDIA and Oracle.

The Commerce Department claims that Biden's export rules "would undermine U.S. diplomatic relations with dozens of countries, reducing their status to secondary. In the future, the Department will issue another notice formalizing the repeal of the rules."

Sources familiar with the situation report that the Trump administration is developing its approach and, in particular, is considering the option of negotiating individual agreements with individual countries.

The department also emphasizes in its statement that regardless of the outcome of the repeal of the rules, it will be "a bold, inclusive strategy for American artificial intelligence technology with trusted foreign countries around the world, while ensuring that the technology does not fall into the hands of our adversaries."

Under Biden’s export rules, the world was divided into three tiers. The first included seventeen countries and Taiwan, which could receive unlimited amounts of chips. About 120 other countries are in the second tier, which limits the number of AI chips they can get. The third tier, which is the most worrisome, countries like China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea, do not have access to the chips.