The United States government is finding that asserting global dominance in artificial intelligence is far more difficult than simply issuing executive decrees. In a major setback for the White House’s tech diplomacy, the Department of Commerce’s ambitious plan to make American artificial intelligence the world’s default technology stack is off to an underwhelming start. When the first official call for proposals under the American AI Exports Program closed, the results fell far short of internal government expectations.
According to former trade officials, the Commerce Department received just 78 proposals from industry consortia. Inside the agency, coordinators had projected hundreds of applications, hoping the private sector would aggressively line up to participate in a program designed to package and export American technology. Instead, the tepid response highlights a growing, fundamental friction at the heart of U.S. technology policy: the administration is struggling to balance its aggressive desire to dominate the global artificial intelligence market with its own ad-hoc, highly restrictive national security and export rules.
For American tech companies, participating in government-backed initiatives is increasingly viewed as a double-edged sword. While the program promises federal financing tools and state-level diplomatic promotion, developers are highly reluctant to lock themselves into official government frameworks. They fear that doing so will subject them to sudden, unpredictable export bans that could destroy their international customer relationships, handing global market share to foreign competitors who operate with far greater regulatory certainty.
The Architectural Blueprint: What Is the American AI Exports Program?
The origins of this export push trace back to a major executive order issued on July 23, 2025, titled “Promoting the Export of the American AI Technology Stack.” The directive aimed to create a robust, coordinated roadmap to ensure that global allies and developing nations build their digital infrastructure on American software, hardware, and security protocols rather than Chinese alternatives.
To achieve this, the Department of Commerce designed a program centered on “full-stack American AI technology packages.” Instead of exporting individual components, the program seeks to bundle everything a foreign government or enterprise needs to deploy artificial intelligence. These packages encompass advanced semiconductor hardware, secure data storage systems, foundation models, cybersecurity measures, and localized end-user applications customized for specific industries like agriculture, healthcare, and finance.
Once the Commerce Department selects and approves these packaged proposals, they receive “priority access” status. This status unlocks powerful federal support, including export financing tools coordinated by the Export-Import Bank of the United States and high-level diplomatic advocacy managed by the State Department’s Economic Diplomacy Action Group.
The Role of Pre-Set and On-Demand Consortia
To facilitate these exports, the Commerce Department established a dual structure for private sector participation, inviting companies to form two distinct types of industry-led consortia. The first is the pre-set consortium. These groups are designed to demonstrate ongoing, comprehensive capabilities across all layers of the artificial intelligence technology stack, maintaining global offerings that are ready for deployment at any moment. Once designated, these pre-set consortia serve as the official, off-the-shelf technology options that U.S. diplomats pitch to foreign allies.
The second structure is the on-demand consortium. These are custom-made groups formed by private companies in direct response to a specific, localized opportunity identified by the export program. On-demand consortia only need to cover the specific layers of the technology stack required for that individual deal.
While this dual structure was designed to provide flexibility for both massive tech conglomerates and smaller, specialized startups, the low application numbers suggest that neither model has successfully convinced the industry that the benefits of government partnership outweigh the regulatory risks.
Chasing Geopolitical Sovereignty in Allied Markets
The primary target markets for the export program are key strategic allies that are actively building their own “sovereign AI” capabilities. Nations like South Korea, Japan, and several member states of the European Union are highly cautious about becoming entirely dependent on foreign technology providers for their critical digital infrastructure. They are investing heavily to develop domestic models, localized data centers, and native hardware pipelines to protect their data privacy and economic sovereignty.
The American AI Exports Program was pitched as a collaborative bridge to address these sovereign concerns. By offering customizable, secure, and state-of-the-art American packages, U.S. officials hoped to convince these allies to integrate their sovereign systems within a broader, U.S.-led technology ecosystem.
Solidifying these allies within an American-anchored framework is a major geopolitical priority, as it prevents them from turning to cheaper Chinese-led alternatives. However, achieving this goal requires the United States to prove that it can serve as a reliable, predictable partner—a reputation that is currently being undermined by Washington’s own erratic trade policies.
The Chilling Effect of Ad-Hoc Export Restraints
The primary reason why technology companies are underwhelmed by the export program is the profound operational uncertainty created by the administration’s ad-hoc export restrictions. Over the past year, the White House has repeatedly utilized aggressive, unilateral export controls to block foreign entities from accessing American technology, often catching the industry completely by surprise.
These sudden regulatory shifts have created an atmosphere of deep anxiety in Silicon Valley. Tech executives realize that if they package their products into official, government-promoted consortia, they are inviting intense regulatory scrutiny into their proprietary code, hardware designs, and customer lists.
More importantly, they fear that if the administration abruptly changes its security parameters, their officially promoted products could be hit with retroactive export bans, rendering them illegal to ship and instantly destroying millions of dollars in international contracts.
The Sudden Clampdown on Anthropic’s Frontier Models
The industry’s fears were fully realized in June 2026, when the administration took unprecedented action to restrict foreign access to Anthropic’s most powerful artificial intelligence models, Fable 5 and Mythos 5. Using highly aggressive export controls, the Commerce Department barred Anthropic from allowing foreign nationals—including those located within the United States—from accessing or using these advanced models without an explicit, government-issued license.
This directive pushed the legal limits of government authority, extending traditional export controls on physical goods to cover cloud-based API access. The immediate result was operational chaos. Anthropic was forced to abruptly disable access to its services for numerous international clients, triggering widespread anger and confusion.
For other AI developers, the Anthropic clampdown served as a stark warning. It proved that even close, compliant partnerships with the government cannot protect a company from sudden, disruptive export interventions, making them highly hesitant to sign up for new government-led export programs.
High Operational Uncertainty on K Street and Silicon Valley
The fallout from the Anthropic restrictions has reached the highest levels of corporate leadership and trade lobbying. On K Street, technology lobbyists are increasingly pessimistic about the administration’s ability to manage its competing priorities. They point out that while the Commerce Department is trying to promote American AI as the global default, the administration’s ad-hoc security restrictions are making it impossible for companies to guarantee product delivery to their foreign buyers.
This lack of regulatory predictability is a major competitive disadvantage. When a foreign government or enterprise is deciding whether to build its digital infrastructure on an American or Chinese stack, reliability is just as important as technical performance.
If a foreign buyer knows that a U.S. export control decision could suddenly shut off their access to critical models or cloud servers, they are far more likely to choose alternative providers, even if those alternatives are technically inferior. By prioritizing short-term, reactive security bans over long-term strategic certainty, the administration is inadvertently driving its allies away from the American technology stack.
The Administrative Bottleneck: Commerce Under Pressure
The disappointing launch of the export program also exposes significant administrative bottlenecks within the Department of Commerce, which is currently led by Secretary Howard Lutnick. Under the Trump administration, the agency has found itself at the absolute center of the global technology race, tasked with executing both aggressive export promotions and highly complex national security reviews.
This dual mandate has strained the agency’s resources, causing critical decision-making processes to slow to a crawl. The Bureau of Industry and Security, which is responsible for evaluating export license applications and designing technology safeguards, is facing a massive backlog of cases.
With Under Secretary William Kimmitt and other senior trade officials occupied with managing high-stakes tariff disputes and complex bilateral negotiations with allies like South Korea and Japan, the administrative machinery required to support a fast-moving, high-tech export program has struggled to keep pace.
The Contrast with China’s Aggressive Global Engagement
While the United States struggles to launch its promotion program, China is pursuing a highly coordinated, frictionless strategy to expand its global AI footprint. Chinese technology giants like Alibaba, Tencent, and DeepSeek are aggressively exporting cost-effective, highly capable artificial intelligence models and infrastructure packages to developing markets across Southeast Asia, Latin America, and Africa.
These Chinese offerings are highly competitive because they come with zero political strings, national security reviews, or unilateral export threats. Beijing is actively using its vast manufacturing capacity to supply cheap, AI-optimized hardware and data center equipment to developing nations, establishing Chinese technology as the default infrastructure for the Global South.
If the United States cannot streamline its own export programs and offer its allies a predictable, reliable alternative, it risks permanently losing these rapidly growing markets to its chief geopolitical rival.
Reimagining the Policy: The Path to Regulatory Certainty
To salvage the American AI Exports Program and restore its competitiveness, industry groups and technology policy experts are urging the administration and Congress to pivot toward a more predictable, rule-based approach to technology trade. They argue that global technology dominance cannot be achieved through ad-hoc restrictions and executive overreach.
Instead, the government must establish clear, long-term regulatory frameworks that provide certainty to both American businesses and foreign allies. This involves:
- Creating Predictable Licensing Paths: Establishing fast-track, pre-approved licensing pathways for companies participating in the export program, ensuring they are protected from sudden, retroactive export bans.
- Aligning Export Controls with Allies: Working collaboratively with international partners to design unified, multilateral export controls, rather than relying on unilateral U.S. restrictions that alienate key allies.
- Providing Federal Financing Guarantees: Leveraging the Export-Import Bank and the Development Finance Corporation to offer competitive, low-interest financing packages to foreign nations purchasing American tech stacks, directly undercutting China’s state-backed pricing.
- Separating Commercial Tech from Military Applications: Creating clear, distinct definitions for what constitutes “frontier” military-grade AI versus commercial enterprise software, preventing overbroad security restrictions from strangling legitimate commercial exports.
By shifting its focus from restrictive containment to predictable, market-driven promotion, the United States can build the trust required to make its technology stack the undisputed global standard, securing its technological leadership for decades to come.
