Anything else that can be said about Trump’s second administration is always teaching me about parts of the Constitution that I had forgotten that they were there.
Case in question: Article I, Section 9, clause 5 establishes that “taxes or tariffs will not be established in the articles exported from any state.” This is known as the export clause, which should not be confused with the import-export clause (article I, section 10, clause 2). The Supreme Court has repeatedly held, more recent in the 1996. We v. IBMThat this clause prohibits Congress and states from imposing taxes on exported goods from one State to another or from the United States to foreign countries.
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I found myself reading We v. IBM After President Donald Trump announced a new agreement with the Nvidia and AMD chips manufacturers. They can now export certain previously restricted chips to China, but have to pay a 15 percent tax to the federal government in procedures. Now I am not a lawyer, but several people who are The lawyers, such as the former National Security Council official, Peter Harrell, interpreted this immediately as a clearly unconstitutional export tax (and as illegal by virtue of the 2018 export control law, to start).
At this point, there is something sad and helpless in complaining that something Trump is doing is illegal and not stittoo. He feels like shouting at the referees that the Harlem Globetrotters are not playing fair; Of course they are not, nobody cares. It is unlikely that the referees enter here, either. The parties with the position of demanding and blocking export taxes are NVIDIA and AMD, and have already agreed to accompany it.
Perhaps the best thing we can do is understand why this happened and what it means to the future of AI.
History of a 2025 chips war letter
Although the AMD is included in the agreement, for all practical purposes, the chips in question are being carried out by Nvidia, and the main one in question is H20.
As I explained last month, the H20 is completely the product of US export controls aimed at limiting the export of excessively powerful chips to China. Nvidia took its H100 badge chip, widely used for AI training, and marked its processing power (measured in floating points operations per second), thus satisfying the rules that restrict the advanced chips that the Biden administration established and Trump has maintained.
At the same time, it marked the memory bandwidth (or the speed at which the data between the chip and the system memory is moved) is also adjusted to the H100 levels. That makes the H20 better than the H100 to respond to consultations to the AI Action models, even if it is worse in training those models to begin.
Critics saw all this as an attempt to obey the letter of export controls while violating their spirit. Meeant Nvidia was still exporting very use and powerful chips to Chinese companies, which they could use to catch or leave American companies ahead, precisely what the Biden administration was trying to prevent. In April, the Trump administration seemed to agree when it sent NVIDIA a letter information that would not receive export licenses for the sending of H20 to China.
Then, in July, according to the reports, after negotiation with China on the strange metals of the Earth and a personal entertainment of the founder and CEO of Nvidia, Jensen Huang, Trump Flip-Flop; The chips could go to China after all. The only new thing this month is that you hear a cut of the processes.
That, of course, is an important new element, especially since it seems bad that the president is affirming the power to unilaterally impose new taxes without Congress. (At least with the rates, Trump has some laws approved by Congress that can theoretically cite the authority). But the big question about H20 remains the same: does it help Chinese companies like Deep Key a day with companies like OpenAi? And how bad that is, if it happens?
Speaking through the pros and cons of the H20
The concerns here are such that perhaps the best way to understand them is to imagine a debate between a pro-export and anti-export lawyer. I am taking a poetic license here, partly because people in the sector are avers to say clearly what they mean in the registry. But I think it is a fair reflection of the debate as I have heard.
Anti-export guy: Trump says that the United States has “global dominance” in AI, and here it is, just letting China have very powerful chips. This obviously harms the edge of the United States.
Pro-Export Guy: Does it do it? Again, the H20 is powerful, but it is not H100. In any case, Chinese companies can rent advanced IA chips on cloud servers based in the US. So why are we going crazy to export a weaker chip?
Anti-Export: You act as if the cloud option was a escape, it is a characteristic! In this way, they depend on US servers and companies. If Chinese companies of AI ever begin to do hazardous systems, the United States can turn off their access and will not be lucky.
PRO-EXPORT: Again, willpower They have no luck? There is a third option after Nvidia exports and American servers. Huawei is doing his own optimized chips AI-AI. Chinese companies should not go to foreign servants forever, and if we denied Nvidia chips, they will run directly to Huawei chips.
Anti-Export: To say that you do not need Nvidia chips when you have huawei chips is as you said it about 20 years ago that they do not need an iPod because they have a zune. Yes, Huawei chips existBut they are very worse. They are a lower bandwidth than H20, Huawei software libraries are full of errors and chips are sometimes overwhelmed dangerously.
PRO-EXPORT: You are exaggerating. By Sub metrics, Huawei’s Latest Systems (Not Just The Chips, But the Surrounding Servers) Outperform Nvidia’s Top-End Model-Even Thought Model Uses B200S That Are Faster Than H100s and Lighthears Faster Than You’d Ever Ever Ever Ever Ever Ever’d ever’d ever’d ever’d ever’d ever’d ever Google, Anthrope and Openai have recently moved away from Nvidia chips towards things like TPUS themselves or Amazon coaches. That effort of Tang, but they did.
Anti-Export: Of course, but those companies still use Nvidia too. Operai wants 100,000 chips only in a Norwegian installation. And although US companies may be testing competition, Chinese companies still prefer Nvidia to Huawei. According to reports, Depseek had to delay his latest model because he tried to train him in Huawei chips, but could not. Even if Huawei chips were popular, Huawei lacks the production capacity to meet demand. It is based on smuggling components to make its high -end chips and can produce a maximum of 200,000 this year, compared to the approximately 10 million NVIDIA chips sent annually. There is no substitute for nvidias.
For what we are fighting
I suppose we will see, in the coming months and at the launch of new competitors such as Huawei chips, who obtained the best of that argument. According to reports, China is discouraging companies to use NVIDIA chips following the export tax agreement, largely to encourage them to use national chips like Huawei, although they are clearly not abundant Companies to use NVIDIAS if necessary. He is also investigating whether the United States includes Spyware in them.
The most important question posed by this debate, and one that I certainly cannot answer properly here, is: to what extent is “surpassing China” to the important one to make the future of AI go well?
The answer for most of those in charge of formulating US policies, and most people I know in the world of safety of AI have been “very”. Financial Times reports that some Trump officials are considering renouncing in the protest to allow China to get H20. As Leopold Aschenbrenner, the AI analyst became a coverage financier, expressed it without surroundings in his influential essay of 2024 “situational consciousness”: “The superintelligence will give those who will handle the power to crush the opposition, the dissent.” If China “wins”, then, the result for humanity is permanent authoritarian repression.
Without a doubt, the Beijing regime is brutal, and I have no faith that they will use AI wisely. I am sure that Chinese oppressions will awaken it. But it seems that “staying ahead of China” has become the sine qua no or the US AI.
I am less concerned that this approach in China is directly incorrect and more than exaggerated. The greatest danger is that nobody You can control these systems, instead of China can, and that the focus on staying ahead of China will make the United States accelerate the deployment of automated weapons systems that could be deeply destabilizing and dangerous.
As with most aspects of AI, I feel that there is a small island of things that we are all super and a fixed or unknowns. I think that China’s sacrifice H20 probably hurts AI’s security. Yo Think.