Commerce Dept. Issues New Export Restrictions on AI Technology

by John Jenkins

January 30, 2025

During the Biden administration’s waning days, the Commerce Department issued a new rule imposing significant new restrictions on the export of advanced AI technologies and model weights.  This excerpt from Dentons’ memo on the new rule provides some specifics on the technologies that are restricted:

Amongst other requirements, the new rule requires a license to export, reexport, or transfer (in-country) the integrated circuits and/or model weights of the most advanced AI models to certain designated countries, absent an applicable license exception. Under this new regime, the US government will review applications for a license based on the “sensitivity of the destination, the quantity of compute power or performance of the AI model, and the security requirements agreed to by the recipient.”

The inclusion of export controls on model weights is significant. Model weights are numerical parameters within an AI model that help determine the model’s outputs in response to inputs. According to the BIS, the unchecked diffusion of model weights for advanced AI models presents a national security risk because such weights could be manipulated and misused by bad actors. The new rule therefore imposes a global licensing requirement on the model weights of the most advanced AI models – defined as the model weights of any closed-weight AI model that has been trained on more than 1026 computational operations. Consistent with BIS’s approach to controlling other types of technology, the new rule does not control open-source model weights that meet this threshold.

The memo notes that with the new administration, there is some uncertainty about whether this rule will be subject to further adjustment.  It also cautions that additional model weights may come into focus as new breakthroughs reduce the computing power necessary to run advance AI models.

Don’t know what “model weights” are?  Neither did I, but I found this explanation helpful, particularly the part where they compared model weights to “volume knobs that control how much influence each input (like an image detail or a text entry) has on the final decision by the AI.”