The Biden administration is poised to open up a new front in its effort to safeguard US AI from China with preliminary plans to place guardrails around the most advanced AI models, the core software of artificial intelligence systems like ChatGPT, sources said.

The commerce department is considering a new regulatory push to restrict the export of proprietary or closed source AI models, whose software and the data it is trained on are kept under wraps, three people familiar with the matter said.

Any action would complement a series of measures put in place over the last two years to block the export of sophisticated AI chips to China in an effort to slow Beijing’s development of cutting-edge technology for military purposes.

Even so, it will be hard for regulators to keep pace with the industry’s fast-moving developments.

The commerce department declined to comment. The Chinese embassy in Washington did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Currently, nothing is stopping US AI giants like Microsoft-backed OpenAI, Alphabet’s Google DeepMind and rival Anthropic, which have developed some of the most powerful closed-source AI models, from selling them to almost anyone in the world without government oversight.

Government and private sector researchers worry US adversaries could use the models, which mine vast amounts of text and images to summarise information and generate content, to wage aggressive cyber attacks or even create potent biological weapons.

To develop an export control on AI models, the sources said the US may turn to a threshold contained in an AI executive order issued last October that is based on the amount of computing power it takes to train a model.

When that level is reached, a developer must report its AI model development plans and provide test results to the commerce department.

That computing power threshold could become the basis for determining what AI models would be subject to export restrictions, according to two US officials and another source briefed on the discussions. They declined to be named because details have not been made public.