Since October 2022, the United States has devoted significant resources to restricting China’s access to artificial intelligence (AI) and advanced semiconductor technologies. In the final months of the Biden administration, the Department of Commerce issued four additional far-reaching export control updates. On December 2, 2024, it released two rules that added 140 companies to the Entity List, expanded the scope of the Foreign Direct Product Rule (FDPR), and restricted new technology areas such as high-bandwidth memory, among other measures. In the second week of January 2025, the Department of Commerce issued the AI Diffusion Framework and the Foundry Due Diligence Rule, further shaping the spread of AI and semiconductor technologies throughout the world. Export controls remain front and center for the second Trump administration, which directed an effort to “identify and eliminate loopholes in existing export controls—especially those that enable the transfer of strategic goods, software, services, and technology . . . to strategic rivals and their proxies” on its first day in office. However, countries like the Netherlands, Germany, South Korea, Japan, and Taiwan continue to control key chokepoints in the AI and semiconductor value chain, making unilateral action only so effective. Furthermore, the existing multilateral export control architecture is neither sufficiently flexible nor fast to allow for the kind of sophisticated, targeted controls that the United States has levied on China. The success or failure of the U.S. export control strategy is thus dependent on its allies’ ability to implement controls outside of this traditional architecture or U.S. extraterritorial regulations covering allies. This paper provides an in-depth analysis of U.S. allies’ export control authorities related to AI and semiconductor technologies and does the same analysis for China. It demonstrates that U.S. allies often do not have equivalents to U.S. export control authorities and tools like the FDPR and Entity List, but that they generally do have the capability to introduce some controls on advanced semiconductor chips and related equipment not covered by multilateral export control regimes. As a result, lack of alignment with the U.S. export control regime cannot necessarily be attributed to a lack of authorities alone. Allies’ enforcement capacity and willingness to act are also key ingredients in the implementation of effective export controls and are crucial to the success of U.S. and allied technology competition with China. Accordingly, the recommendations section of this paper addresses each of these three elements. The paper proceeds as follows. First, it identifies key export control authorities used by the United States to slow the progress of China’s AI and semiconductor industries and analyzes which other countries possess these authorities and are thus capable of implementing similar controls. It then surveys the export control policies of key actors, including the European Union, the Netherlands, Germany, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and China. It concludes by offering recommendations to U.S. and allied policymakers to make AI and semiconductor export controls more effective.
Understanding U.S. Allies’ Current Legal Authority to Implement AI and Semiconductor Export Controls
