Industrial Policy & Trade Monitor· 2663 actions· ✨ 89 recent

Malaysia's Ministry of Investment, Trade and Industry, acting through the Strategic Trade Controller, issued Directive No. 1/2025 on 14 July 2025 invoking Section 12 of the Strategic Trade Act 2010 to declare high-performance US-origin AI chips (GPUs, TPUs, neural processors, AI accelerators meeting the Annex I total-processing-performance and performance-density thresholds) as "unlisted controlled items". With effect from 14 July 2025, any export, transshipment, or transit of those chips through Malaysian territory requires a Strategic Trade Permit, a 30-day prior notification, an export-control classification from the manufacturer, and a re-export licence from the originating country. The directive is the formal Malaysian response to US scrutiny over alleged Nvidia AI-chip flows to China via Malaysian freight forwarders and data-centre operators, and it remains binding even after the US relaxes its own export rules.

H.R.1, the "One Big Beautiful Bill Act" (Public Law 119-21), was signed into law by President Trump on 4 July 2025. The budget-reconciliation statute is the single largest reversal of the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) industrial-policy framework: it accelerates the termination of IRA-era clean- energy tax credits and overlays a new "Foreign Entity of Concern" (FEOC) / "Prohibited Foreign Entity" (PFE) regime on the credits that survive. The §25E used-EV credit, the §30D new clean-vehicle credit, the §45W commercial clean-vehicle credit, and the §30C alternative-fuel-refueling-property credit terminate for vehicles or property placed in service after 30 September 2025. The §25C energy-efficient home improvement credit and the §25D residential clean-energy credit terminate for property placed in service after 31 December 2025. The §45Y clean-electricity production credit and §48E clean-electricity investment credit are eliminated for wind and solar facilities placed in service after 31 December 2027, with a safe harbour for projects whose construction begins on or before 4 July 2026. From 1 January 2026, projects beginning construction must satisfy "material assistance" thresholds limiting the share of components, subcomponents and critical minerals sourced from prohibited foreign entities (PRC, Russia, Iran, DPRK and entities controlled by them). For §45Y/§48E facilities the threshold starts at 40% non-PFE content in 2026 and steps up by 5 percentage points per year through 2030; for §45X advanced manufacturing PTC the analogous schedule begins at 50% in 2026 and rises through the decade. CBO scored the package's energy-credit terminations as generating roughly USD 280bn of revenue (gross), of which USD 77.4bn from §25D termination, USD 21.2bn from §25C, USD 77.8bn from §30D, USD 104.5bn from §45W, and USD 2bn from §30C, partially offsetting the bill's other tax cuts. The bill simultaneously re-authorises and broadens the §48D advanced manufacturing investment tax credit for semiconductor fabs, raising the credit rate from 25% to 35% for property placed in service after 31 December 2025 (preserving the CHIPS Act-aligned semiconductor leg of the IRA-era stack). The OBBBA therefore reshapes the IRA from a broad-based clean-energy + EV + manufacturing pull-through into a narrower, China-decoupling industrial policy concentrated on semiconductors and (residually) §45X battery / critical- mineral processing.

On 13 May 2025, two days before the AI Diffusion Rule's primary 15 May 2025 compliance date, the Trump administration's BIS announced it would rescind the Biden-era Framework for AI Diffusion (90 FR 4544) and simultaneously issued three guidance documents that re-routed US AI export policy through existing EAR authorities. The package comprises (1) GP10 guidance asserting that all ECCN 3A090 ICs designed by PRC-headquartered firms are presumptively EAR-violative, with Huawei Ascend 910B/910C/910D processors named explicitly — making US- and non-US-person use, transfer, financing, or servicing of those chips anywhere in the world a presumptive General Prohibition 10 violation; (2) a policy statement warning industry that supplying US advanced computing ICs for training or inference of Chinese AI models risks EAR enforcement; and (3) industry guidance on diversion-prevention diligence. BIS stated a formal Federal Register rescission and replacement rule would follow.

The US Bureau of Industry and Security amended the Export Administration Regulations to add 12 entities to the Entity List under the destinations of China (11) and Taiwan (1) via Final Rule 2025-05427 (90 FR 14046), companion to the larger 70-entity rule (2025-05426) published the same day. Targets fall in three clusters: (i) Beijing Academy of Artificial Intelligence and Beijing Innovation Wisdom Technology — added for acquiring US-origin items in support of China's military modernization, specifically developing large AI models and advanced computing chips for defense; (ii) the Inspur group — Inspur (Beijing) Electronic Information Industry, Inspur Electronic Information Industry, Inspur Electronic Information (Hong Kong), Inspur (HK) Electronics, Inspur Software, and Inspur Taiwan — added as subsidiaries contributing to supercomputers for military end use; and (iii) Henan Dingxin, Nettrix Information Industry, Suma Technology, and Suma-USI Electronics — added for involvement in the development of Chinese exascale supercomputers. License requirements are for all items subject to the EAR; review policy is presumption of denial for the AI cluster and policy of denial for the supercomputer clusters.

President Trump signed Executive Order 14179 on 23 January 2025 (published in the Federal Register on 31 January 2025 as 90 FR 8741, doc 2025-02172). The order revokes Biden-era Executive Order 14110 of 30 October 2023 ("Safe, Secure, and Trustworthy Development and Use of Artificial Intelligence") and directs federal agencies to identify and rescind, revise, or suspend any policies, regulations, memoranda, or guidance documents adopted pursuant to the revoked Biden order. It mandates that the Assistant to the President for Science and Technology, the Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs, the Special Advisor for AI and Crypto, and the Assistant to the President for Economic Policy develop an AI Action Plan within 180 days to "sustain and enhance America's global AI dominance." The plan was released on 23 July 2025. EO 14179 reframes US AI industrial-policy posture from safety-first regulation to deregulation, infrastructure investment, and export-competitiveness.

BIS published an interim final rule (FR Doc 2025-00711, 90 FR 4544-publication slot; companion to the AI Diffusion Framework signed three days earlier) revising the EAR to add explicit due-diligence procedures for advanced computing integrated circuits captured by ECCN 3A090. The rule (i) creates an Authorized IC Designer / Approved IC Packager regime so that foundries and OSATs can identify trustworthy customers via lists maintained by BIS, (ii) imposes new front-end-fabricator reporting requirements for any 3A090.a IC produced for an authorized IC designer to give the US government supply-chain visibility, and (iii) adjusts the scope of covered advanced-computing items. Effective 16 January 2025; compliance required from 31 January 2025; comment period extended to 14 March 2025. The rule was immediately followed by the 16 January Entity List additions (Sophgo et al.) targeting circumvention paths and was technically amended on 14 February 2025 to narrow the RS license requirement to ECCN 3A090.a only.

The Bureau of Industry and Security signed an Interim Final Rule on 13 January 2025 (90 FR 4544, published 15 January 2025) introducing the first horizontal export-control regime for advanced AI compute and closed-weight model weights. It revised ECCN 3A090 advanced-IC thresholds, created a new ECCN 4E091 covering closed-weight model weights trained on more than 10^26 operations, and bucketed every destination worldwide into a three-tier country group: Tier 1 (~18 close allies, license-free flows), Tier 2 (the rest of the world, per-country compute caps with National VEU and Universal VEU pathways), Tier 3 (US arms-embargoed destinations including China and Russia under comprehensive denial). It added license exceptions AIA, ACM, and LPP and set staggered compliance dates of 15 May 2025 (general) and 15 January 2026 (data-center / model-weight provisions). The Trump administration's BIS rescinded the rule on 13 May 2025 — two days before the primary compliance date — but it was on the books for four months and shaped allied compliance build-out and the architecture of subsequent US AI export controls.