President Donald Trump and his administration are reportedly planning to rescind the Biden-era “AI Diffusion Rule” — a regulation that created three tiers of countries to govern the export of chips from companies including Nvidia Corp.

Matt Mittelsteadt, a research fellow at the Cato Institute, has previously commented on the rule and issued the following statement in response to the reports:

“The AI diffusion was an immensely complicated bureaucratic mess and the administration’s move to partially rescind the rule is the right call. An important question that yet remains: will Trump also reverse the planned export controls on advanced AI models? While chips were the focus of the Diffusion Rule, many overlooked the fact that it also placed potentially heavy constraints on the export of advanced model weights. By saddling model exporters with heavy data center security costs and licensure requirements these remaining controls still represent a considerable burden that could meaningfully hold back international American AI success.”

If you’d like to speak with Mittelsteadt, please reach out to mmiler@​cato.​org.