IFP Roundup: global AI competition, export controls, immigrant founders, and much more

Apr 22, 2025

A few quick announcements:

We’re hiring Fellows and Senior Fellows for our metascience team. We will pay a bounty of $3,000 for a referral that leads to a successful hire. Apply here.

We’re thrilled to be cohosting the Progress Conference again this year. The event will take place in Berkeley, CA from October 16th to 19th. Speakers from IFP include Caleb Watney, Alec Stapp, Tim Fist, Santi Ruiz, and Chris Elmendorf. Apply to attend here.
We’re also excited to be cohosting the Abundance Conference in Washington, DC on September 4th and 5th. Registration isn’t open yet, but you can sign up for event updates here.

1. IFP testified before Congress on global AI competition

Director of Emerging Technology Policy Tim Fist testified before Congress on DeepSeek and how to keep the US in the lead on AI, with a special focus on energy, R&D, and talent. Tim’s testimony highlighted three critical concerns: security risks from Chinese open-source AI, America's need for better technical intelligence capabilities, and the continued importance of export controls.
He then outlined an R&D agenda focused on boosting American open-source AI through federal prize competitions, launching a "Human Genome Project" for AI interpretability, securing AI chips and data centers, and implementing "pre-deployment hardening" for critical infrastructure.
Tim also went on the Complex Systems podcast with Patrick McKenzie to talk about AI and energy issues.

Tao Burga, Arushi Gupta, and Tim Fist wrote a piece making the case that NVIDIA’s sales of H20 AI chips to China likely violated US export controls, and called on the Bureau of Industry and Security (BIS) to block the sales by notifying the company.
Shortly after our piece was published, NVIDIA disclosed that the US government had informed the company that the export of H20 chips violates supercomputer end-use restrictions, as we claimed. Reuters referenced our research in their coverage and Tim went on the TBPN livestream to talk about the news.
But more work still needs to be done:
- BIS should update export controls to cover inference chips.
- The White House should empower a technical team — ideally within the AI Safety Institute (AISI) at NIST — to forecast AI threats and proactively shape control policy.
- BIS should track chips once exported to high-risk locations by incentivizing industry adoption of chip geolocation features.

High-skilled immigration has long been a key driver of US technological leadership. This is especially true today — with immigrant entrepreneurs powering American AI dominance. New analysis from Director of Immigration Policy Jeremy Neufeld and Immigration Fellow Lindsay Milliken shows that 60% of the top US-based AI companies have at least one immigrant founder.
The analysis draws from the new 2025 Forbes “AI 50” list of top startups developing promising AI applications. 42 of the 2025 list were US-based companies, of which 25 were founded or cofounded by immigrants.
Axios covered the release of our report here.

In a new white paper for IFP, Tom Ough tells the story of the Frontier Observatory for Research in Geothermal Energy (FORGE), a $218 million field laboratory started in 2014 to conduct hands-on research into “enhanced geothermal systems,” or EGS, a promising form of geothermal power.
FORGE has demonstrated the effectiveness of government-backed field research in unlocking new energy technologies. Its success suggests that similar de-risking models could be applied to other sectors facing market failures.

How to fix crime in New York City. Santi interviewed Peter Moskos, a professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, about his new book, an oral history that attempts to understand and describe exactly how the city’s leaders managed to drive down crime so successfully in the early 1990s.
How to fund new energy tech. Santi interviewed Narayan Subramanian, a Department of Energy and National Security Council official in the Biden administration, about how a big influx of money can best be used to support innovative energy projects.
How to fix risk assessment in child welfare. Santi interviewed Alex Jucta, the head of analytics and technology at the Allegheny County Department of Human Services, where his team’s mission is to build the country’s leading R&D lab for local government.

Who wins Nobel Prizes? Brian looks at two datasets related to Nobel Prizes in physics, medicine, and chemistry — one for biographical facts about winners and one about their prize-winning work — to spot patterns and emerging trends.
Understanding US power outages. Brian analyzes a comprehensive dataset on power outages at the country and utility level going back to 2017 to better understand grid resiliency.
50 things Brian has learned writing Construction Physics. After 600,000 words and 4.5 years writing his newsletter, Brian does a retrospective sharing his biggest takeaways and the most interesting facts he’s learned.

The Foundation for American Innovation led a coalition letter calling on DOE to preserve the Loan Programs Office (LPO).
A bipartisan group of senators introduced the Fix Our Forests Act, which would streamline environmental review for wildfire mitigation projects.
Sam Hammond wrote an op-ed for The New York Times on why US policymakers should focus on export promotion, rather than import substitution via tariffs.
Non-Resident Senior Fellow Nick Bagley and David Schleicher have a new working paper on state capacity issues at the state level.