WASHINGTON—The federal government issued a rule on Monday limiting the distribution of advanced artificial intelligence (AI) technology to foreign adversaries, including Russia and China.
The rule seeks to ensure that AI technology, particularly chips critical for AI, remains under U.S. control.
“The U.S. leads the world in AI now—both AI development and AI chip design—and it’s critical that we keep it that way,” Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo told reporters during a call on Sunday. “As AI becomes more powerful, the risks to our national security become even more intense.”
While many commercial applications use AI, Raimondo noted that U.S. adversaries can also use it “to run nuclear simulations, develop bioweapons, and advance their militaries.”
The rule focuses solely on the most advanced AI technologies.
There will be no restrictions on chip sales to 20 key allies and partners, allowing them to purchase AI technology easily. There will be a “broad diffusion and sharing” of the technology with these countries, Raimondo said.
Chip orders with collective computation power of up to 1,700 advanced GPUs (graphics processing units) do not require a license and are not subject to national chip caps. The vast majority of chip orders fall into this category, particularly those made by universities and research institutions, according to a fact sheet by the White House.
The new rule encourages U.S. allies and partners worldwide to choose trusted vendors, including both U.S. and local vendors that meet strong security standards.
Companies that meet strict security and trust standards and are based in close allies or partner countries can obtain “Universal Verified End User” (UVEU) status, enabling them to deploy 7 percent of their global AI computational capacity in countries around the world.
“Supply chain activities are explicitly excluded so chips can move where they need to be packaged or tested,” Raimondo said. “We’ve also been crystal clear that this does not apply to gaming chips.”
The rule seeks to address concerns that AI, in the wrong hands, could pose “significant national security risks, including by enabling the development of weapons of mass destruction, supporting powerful offensive cyber operations, and aiding human rights abuses, such as mass surveillance,” according to the fact sheet.
The White House’s national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, stated during the call that the United States should be ready for a rapid rise in AI capability, which could have significant effects on the country’s economy and national security.
The rule, according to Sullivan, ensures that the infrastructure for training cutting-edge AI stays in the United States or with its closest allies, preventing it from being moved overseas like chips, batteries, and other industries that Washington spent billions to bring back. The new rule also aims to ensure that small tech companies have access to limited AI hardware.
“The rule makes it hard for our strategic competitors to use smuggling and remote access to abate our export controls,” he added.
Last week, Nvidia criticized the Biden administration for imposing last-minute rules.
“We would encourage President Biden to not preempt incoming President Trump by enacting a policy that will only harm the U.S. economy, set America back, and play into the hands of U.S. adversaries,” Nvidia Vice President Ned Finkle said in a Jan. 9. statement.
Raimondo defended the action, claiming that the Biden administration received input from industry and civil society representatives and experts on Capitol Hill.
“No rule is perfect. This is a complicated and rapidly evolving industry,” she said. “We have taken an extraordinary step of providing a very long comment period of 120 days.”
The rule builds on the Biden administration’s previous actions, including the October 2022 and October 2023 chip controls.
“This issue has been a bipartisan one,” a senior administration official said.
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
