The US Commerce Department has withdrawn a proposed regulation that would have limited exports of advanced artificial intelligence chips worldwide without prior approval from the US government, according to an electronic notice posted on a federal website.

The update appeared Friday on the website of the Office of Management and Budget, which indicated that the interagency review process for the proposed rule had concluded and that the measure had been withdrawn. The notice did not include additional explanation about why the proposal was pulled.

We’d love to be your preferred source for news.

Please add us to your preferred sources list so our news, data and interviews show up in your feed. Thanks!

A Trump administration official said late Friday that the rule had only been a draft and that discussions surrounding it were still preliminary. The withdrawal was reported earlier Friday by Reuters.

The draft regulation had previously been described by Bloomberg News as part of the Trump administration’s emerging approach to controlling global access to advanced semiconductor technology, though the report noted the proposal could still change significantly or be abandoned entirely. According to Bloomberg, the proposal represented one of the administration’s most substantial steps toward forming a worldwide strategy for regulating exports of AI chips after it scrapped the regulatory framework inherited from the Biden administration last year.

Read more: OpenAI Urges Trump Administration to Expand Chips Act Incentives for AI Infrastructure

Last week, the Commerce Department responded to the earlier Bloomberg report by stating that “we will not” return to the previous administration’s AI diffusion framework, which officials criticized as “burdensome, overreaching and disastrous.” According to Bloomberg, the withdrawn proposal would have placed the Commerce Department’s licensing office at the center of export decisions, requiring officials to evaluate shipments of AI chips produced by companies such as Nvidia Corp. and Advanced Micro Devices Inc. on a case-by-case basis.

Under the draft framework, approvals for exports would have depended on several factors, including agreements between governments and the amount of computing power requested by the end user, according to Bloomberg. The proposed system would have required companies seeking to ship advanced chips abroad to obtain specific authorization from US regulators.

For now, the withdrawal leaves unclear what direction the administration may take next in shaping rules governing the international flow of AI hardware, a sector that has become increasingly central to both economic competition and national security. According to Bloomberg, policymakers have been weighing how to manage the spread of high-performance computing technologies while maintaining the competitiveness of US chipmakers in global markets.