How Trump's planned AI exports program works
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Companies are gearing up to join a Commerce Department program designed to supercharge U.S. AI exports.
Why it matters: The Trump administration wants U.S. tech in the hands of allies to strengthen its global competitive edge and counter China.
State of play: The administration has until Oct. 21 to set up a program to support "full-stack AI export packages" per an executive order.
- Companies across the AI ecosystem are expected to come together and offer proposals for the infrastructure, tools and models they want the government to designate as "priority" AI export packages.
- Companies that are accepted into the program would get federal loans, government investment and expedited licensing.
- But the timeline laid out in the executive order could be delayed by the shutdown.
The government would dedicate diplomatic resources to make sure the U.S. is involved in multilateral AI efforts and partnerships with specific countries exporters want to target, like the recently signed tech pact with the U.K.
- The Commerce Department, the State Department and the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy are tasked with standing up what will be called the "American AI Exports Program."
How it works: A so-called full stack is made up of various components, including:
- Hardware. Think Nvidia's or AMD's chips, Dell's servers and Intel's accelerators.
- Data center storage. Like IBM's offerings and cloud services from Amazon or Microsoft.
- Data pipelines and labeling systems. These are tools that companies like Meta and Scale AI are working on that move or annotate data such as images, text or video.
- AI models. For example, OpenAI's ChatGPT, Google's Gemini or Anthropic's Claude.
- AI apps for specific use cases. These could be focused on sectors ranging from health care and agriculture to transportation or finance.
Other requirements to receive the benefits of the program include:
- The government wants companies to describe to what extent hardware is manufactured in the U.S.
- Companies are also being asked for a high-level explanation of which entities will build, own, and operate data centers and related infrastructure.
- For the AI models, the government wants companies to detail their cybersecurity.
- Companies also have to identify the countries and regions they want to target with exports.
Yes, but: There's a push for AI sovereignty — essentially the ability to control the use, development and regulation of AI — around the world. Countries and regional blocs want to prioritize their own companies.
- The EU, for example, just announced a $1.1 billion plan to ramp up AI in its own key industries.
The bottom line: Companies are already joining forces to meet the demands of AI, and the AI exports program perks will likely further incentivize that.
- OpenAI and AMD announced a deal this week, Nvidia and Intel are teaming up, and Anthropic has taken investments from Google and Amazon.
