On July 22, 2025, the US Senate unanimously passed the Maintaining American Superiority by Improving Export Control Transparency Act (H.R. 1316), sending it to President Trump for his signature. The Act would amend the Export Control Reform Act of 2018 (“ECRA”) to require the Secretary of Commerce to submit an annual report to Congress on license applications, enforcement actions, and other requests for authorization handled by the US Commerce Department’s Bureau of Industry and Security…
On June 30, 2025, the White House reissued National Security Presidential Memorandum-5 (“2025 NSPM-5”) focused on Cuba policy that it published in largely the same form in the first Trump Administration (see the “2017 NSPM-5”). As acknowledged in Section 4(a) of the reissued document, much of the contents of the 2025 NSPM-5 was already implemented in the first Trump Administration pursuant to the 2017 NSPM-5. Along with 2025 NSPM-5, the White House issued a related…
On May 13, 2025, the US Department of Commerce’s Bureau of Industry and Security (“BIS”) initiated a rescission of the Biden Administration’s AI Diffusion Rule, which was issued on January 15, 2025 and had been set to take effect on May 15, 2025. The AI Diffusion Rule had introduced additional expansive and complex export controls on certain advanced computing integrated circuits (“IC”) and on model weights for certain advanced closed-weight artificial intelligence (“AI”) models. Our…
In less than two weeks, we have seen Syria go from one of the most heavily sanctioned countries on the planet to a country well on the road to establishing normal trade relations with the Western world. The latest flurry of developments started on May 13, 2025, when President Trump caught much of the world by surprise when he said in a speech in Riyadh: “I will be ordering the cessation of sanctions against Syria…