AI 2040 plan proposes government controls on frontier training, compute and model transfers

The AI 2040 proposal would pause new frontier-training runs while allowing inference by current models. It calls for inference-only verification at major AI data centers, including facilities with more than 10,000 H100 equivalents—described as roughly $100 million in equipment—and independent audits of workloads.

The plan proposes national declarations of AI-compute inventories, disclosure of chip sales records, physical inspections and restrictions on large chip transfers to registered, auditable counterparties. It would also remove high-bandwidth east-west networking inside data centers and use passive optical taps to verify outgoing traffic.

New AI R&D facilities would be built with nation-state-level physical security, air-gapped communications and a bandwidth-capped external connection of 1 megabit per second. Frontier-model weights transferred to inference facilities would be placed on physical storage encrypted independently by the US and China and escorted by representatives of both countries. The proposal’s international enforcement mechanisms and joint US-China oversight are described as difficult to implement.