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

The National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2026 (P.L. 119-60), signed into law on 18 December 2025, expands the Department of Defense's existing "covered materials" domestic- sourcing restriction (which already barred DoD contracting for SmCo/NdFeB magnets, tantalum and tungsten sourced from China, Russia, Iran or North Korea) to add gallium, germanium and molybdenum under Section 844. Restrictions on materials "melted or produced" in a covered nation take effect 31 December 2026, widening on 1 January 2027 to also cover materials "mined, refined, or separated" in a covered nation; the gallium/germanium additions specifically phase in on 18 December 2027. The same NDAA bundles two related supply-chain provisions: Section 867 gives DoD broader authority (contracts, grants, other-transaction agreements, equity-style investments, and anti-market-manipulation subsidies) to invest in the domestic industrial base for critical minerals, microelectronics, machine tools and other defense-relevant capacity, and Section 842 bars DoD from procuring advanced batteries whose cells or key components are owned, sourced, refined or produced by a foreign entity of concern, phased in 2028-2031.

Japan's Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry (METI) revised its Foreign End-User List (外国ユーザーリスト) — the reference list of foreign organisations for which WMD/missile or, for the first time, conventional-weapons development concerns cannot be excluded, used to trigger catch-all export-licence requirements. The revision adds 92 entities (from China, Hong Kong, North Korea, Russia, Pakistan, Iran and the UAE) and removes 5 entities (from China, Iran and India), taking the list to 835 entities across 15 countries and regions — a net increase of 87. The revised list applies from 9 October 2025, the same date Japan's broader catch-all conventional-weapons supplementary export-control review took effect.

On 16 January 2025 the US Bureau of Industry and Security published an interim final rule (90 FR 4598; FR Doc 2025-00723) creating new ECCN 3A069 for high-parameter flow cytometers and liquid chromatography mass spectrometers specially designed for top-down proteomics, plus new ECCN 3E069 for related development and production technology. Items previously controlled under the catch-all ECCN 3A999 are migrated into the dedicated 3A069 classification, which carries National Security (NS), Regional Stability (RS), and Anti-Terrorism (AT) controls. Licensing policy is presumption of denial for destinations in Country Group D:1 and D:5, Macau, and Country Group E (i.e. China, Russia, Iran, North Korea, Cuba, Syria, Venezuela). The rule also adds new EEI/AES filing requirements (§ 758.1(b)(11)) for all 3A069 exports to Country Group D destinations. Public comments were accepted until 17 March 2025.

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.