{"id":351057,"date":"2025-08-17T06:47:10","date_gmt":"2025-08-17T06:47:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/351057\/"},"modified":"2025-08-17T06:47:10","modified_gmt":"2025-08-17T06:47:10","slug":"trump-hiked-tariffs-on-us-imports-now-hes-looking-at-exports-sparking-fears-of-dangerous-precedent-trump-administration","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/351057\/","title":{"rendered":"Trump hiked tariffs on US imports. Now he\u2019s looking at exports \u2013 sparking fears of \u2018dangerous precedent\u2019 | Trump administration"},"content":{"rendered":"

Apple<\/a> CEO Tim Cook<\/a> visited the White House bearing an unusual gift. \u201cThis box was made in California,\u201d Cook reassured his audience in the Oval Office this month, as he took off the lid.<\/p>\n

Inside was a glass plaque, engraved for its recipient, and a slab for the plaque to sit on. \u201cThe base was made in Utah, and is 24-karat gold,\u201d said Cook.<\/p>\n

Donald Trump<\/a> appeared genuinely touched by the gift.<\/p>\n

But the plaque wasn\u2019t Cook\u2019s only offering: Apple announced<\/a> that day it would invest another $100bn in US manufacturing.<\/p>\n

The timing appeared to work well for Apple<\/a>. That day, Trump said Apple would be among the companies that would be exempt from a new US tariff on imported computer chips.<\/p>\n

The Art of the Deal looms large in the White House, where Trump is brokering agreements with powerful tech companies \u2013 in the midst of his trade war \u2013 that are reminiscent of the real estate transactions that launched him into fame.<\/p>\n

But in recent days, this dealmaking has entered uncharted waters.<\/p>\n

Two days after Cook and Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang had a closed-door meeting with Trump at the White House. The president later announced<\/a> Nvidia, along with its rival Advanced Micro Devices (AMD), will be allowed to sell certain artificial intelligence chips to Chinese companies \u2013 so long as they share 15% of their revenue with the US government.<\/p>\n

It was a dramatic about-face from Trump, who initially blocked the chips\u2019 exports in April. And it swiftly prompted suggestions<\/a> that Nvidia was buying its way out of simmering tensions between Washington and Beijing.<\/p>\n

Trade experts say such a deal, where a company essentially pays the US government to export a good, could destabilize trading relations. Martin Chorzempa, a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics, said that it creates \u201cthe perception that export controls are up for sale\u201d.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf you create the perception that licenses, which are supposed to be determined on pure national security grounds, are up for sale, you potentially open up room for there to be this wave of lobbying for all sorts of really, dangerous, sensitive technologies,\u201d Chorzempa said. \u201cI think that\u2019s a very dangerous precedent to set.\u201d<\/p>\n

Though the White House announced the deal, it technically hasn\u2019t been rolled out yet, likely because of legal complications. The White House is calling the deal a \u201crevenue-sharing\u201d agreement, but critics point out that it could also be considered a tax on exports, which may not be legal under US laws or the constitution.<\/p>\n

The \u201clegality\u201d of the deal was \u201cstill being ironed out by the Department of Commerce\u201d, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters this week.<\/p>\n

Nvidia and AMD\u2019s AI chips are at the heart of the technological arms race between the US and China. Nvidia, which became the first publicly traded company to reach a $4tn valuation<\/a> last month, creates the essential processing chips that are used to run and develop AI.<\/p>\n

The US government has played a role in this arms race over the last several years, setting regulations on what AI chips and manufacturing equipment can be sent to China. If China has less computing power, the country will be slower to develop AI, giving a clear advantage to the US.<\/p>\n

But despite the restrictions, China has been catching up, raising questions on how US policy should move forward.<\/p>\n

\u201cThey haven\u2019t held them back as far as the advocates had hoped. The US has an enormous computing advantage over China, but their best models are only a few months behind our best models,\u201d Chorzempa said. For US policymakers, \u201cthe question they\u2019ve had to grapple with is: Where do you draw the line?\u201d<\/p>\n

The AI chips Nvidia and AMD can now sell to China aren\u2019t considered high-end. While they can be used for inference on trained models, they aren\u2019t powerful enough to train new AI models. When announcing the deal with Nvidia and AMD, Trump said<\/a> the chip is \u201can old chip that China already possesses \u2026 under a different label\u201d.<\/p>\n

This is where a major debate on AI policy comes in. Those who take a hardline stance on the US\u2019s relationship with China say that allowing Chinese companies to purchase even an \u201cold chip\u201d could still help the country get an advantage over the US. Others would say a restriction on such chips wouldn\u2019t be meaningful, and could even be counterproductive.<\/p>\n

To balance these two sides, the Trump administration<\/a> is asking companies to pay up in order to export to China \u2013 a solution that people on both sides of the AI debate say is a precarious one.<\/p>\n

\u201cExport controls are a frontline defense in protecting our national security, and we should not set a precedent that incentivizes the government to grant licenses to sell China technology that will enhance AI capabilities,\u201d said John Moolenaar, a Republican US representative from Michigan, in a statement<\/a>.<\/p>\n

But Trump\u2019s gut-reaction to dealmaking seems focused on the wallet. On Wednesday, US treasury secretary Scott Bessent praised the arrangement and suggested it could be extended to other industries over time. \u201cI think that right now this is unique, but now that we have the model and the beta test, why not expand it?\u201d he told Bloomberg.<\/p>\n

Julia Powles, executive director of the Institute for Technology, Law and Policy at the University of California, Los Angeles, said the deal opens up questions of whether similar pressure can be applied to other tech companies.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat other quid pro quo might be asked in the future? The quid pro quo that would be of great concern to the [tech] sector is anything that reduces their reputation for privacy and security,\u201d Powles said. \u201cThat\u2019s thinking of government like a transactional operator, not like an institution with rules about when, how and for what it can extract taxes, levies and subsidies.\u201d<\/p>\n

But that seems to be how the White House runs now. When explaining to the press how he made the deal, Trump said he told Huang: \u201cI want 20% if I\u2019m going to approve this for you\u201d.<\/p>\n

\u201cFor the country, for our country. I don\u2019t want it myself,\u201d the president added. \u201cAnd he said, \u2018Would you make it 15?\u2019 So we negotiated a little deal.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Apple CEO Tim Cook visited the White House bearing an unusual gift. \u201cThis box was made in California,\u201d…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":351058,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5311],"tags":[49,978,659],"class_list":{"0":"post-351057","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-united-states","8":"tag-united-states","9":"tag-us","10":"tag-usa"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/115042768855137791","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/351057","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=351057"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/351057\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/351058"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=351057"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=351057"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=351057"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}