Tech titans: Wanna secure US AI leadership? Stop giving the world excuses to buy Chinese

Execs from several top US tech companies, including Microsoft, AMD, and OpenAI, slammed the Biden administration's export rules for AI chips and said that winning the AI race against China hinges on making it easier, not harder, to use American technology.

Their comments before the US Senate come as the Trump administration weighs sweeping changes to Biden-era export controls, which were set to cap sales of AI accelerators to most countries outside the US and a select few allies.

In a senate hearing [video] Thursday, Microsoft President Brad Smith said, "The number one factor that will define whether the United States or China wins this race is whose technology is most broadly adopted in the rest of the world," said Microsoft President Brad Smith. He argued that the AI diffusion rules proposed by the prior administration tell the rest of the world that that they can't necessary count on the US to sell them the right goods for their AI needs.

"How can you make a bet on suppliers if you're not confident that they'll be able to fulfill your needs?"

AMD CEO Lisa Su echoed Smith's sentiments, warning that if American companies are not permitted to meet the AI needs of other nations, the US government may inadvertently drive them into the arms of Chinese suppliers.

Today, the US produces the most advanced AI accelerators in the world, but China is catching up despite certain disadvantages, Su said. And you don't necessarily need the best chips to be a contender in the AI arena, she added.

"Having the best chips is great, but even if you don't have the best chips, you can get a lot done," she said.

Both Su and Smith agree that export controls, while necessary from a national security perspective to prevent power American technologies from falling into the wrong hands, would benefit from a lighter touch.

"I think the conversation about export controls and rules should just be simple, easy to follow," Su said.

Smith was more direct, suggesting that Uncle Sam scrap the compute limits proposed for so-called tier-2 nations. These nations include just about every country not already subject to US arms embargoes - and go way beyond the 18 countries on Uncle Sam's best-friends list.

"We need, I believe, to get rid of the quantitative caps that were created for all of these tier-2 countries," he said.

Smith and Su are hardly the first to call this tune. Executives from Nvidia and Cerebras have made similar arguments.

"We need to accelerate the diffusion of American AI technology around the world," Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said during a press conference earlier this month. "The policies and encouragement from the administration really need to support that."

OpenAI boss Sam Altman also said he was "glad" to see the rules rescinded, in contrast to comments from rival Anthropic, which had advocated for tightening chip controls even further.

"I agree there will need to be some constraints," he said. "But I think if our mental model is winning diffusion instead of stopping diffusion, that directionally seems right," he said. "Influence comes from people adopting US products and services up and down the stack - maybe, most obviously, if they're using ChatGPT versus DeepSeek, but also if they're using US chips and US data center technology."

During the more than three-hour discussion, Altman downplayed the threat of Chinese models like DeepSeek-R1 and emphasized the importance of combating models like these through competition.

"We're going to release an open source model that, we believe, will be the leading model this summer, because we want people to build on the US stack," he said.

Meanwhile, the Trump administration is signaling that change is indeed on the horizon.

"The Biden AI rule is overly complex, overly bureaucratic, and would stymie American innovation," a Commerce Department spokeswoman told Reuters this week. "We will be replacing it with a much simpler rule that unleashes American innovation and ensures American AI dominance."

Given the Trump administration's unpredictability so far with regard to foreign trade rules, it's hard to know what those rules will actually look like. Some analysts speculate that the president may seek to use AI accelerators as yet another bargaining chip where tariffs prove ineffective.

The Biden-era rules were set to take effect May 15, so we'll find out before then. ®