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AI Daily Brief — 12 May 2025

One of the most policy-dense Mondays of the year. Commerce signalled the formal Diffusion Rule rescission, Treasury announced a 90-day tariff truce with China (a 115-percentage-point cut), OpenAI shipped HealthBench, and Trump left Washington for Riyadh with chip CEOs in tow.

Top stories

  • Commerce signals rescission of Biden’s AI Diffusion Rule three days before its deadline. Under Secretary Jeffrey Kessler instructed enforcement officials to refrain from enforcing the rule. Cleared the way for AI chip exports to Gulf states ahead of Trump’s trip. Commerce simultaneously strengthened other chip-related export controls. via BIS
  • US-China 90-day tariff truce. Treasury’s Scott Bessent and USTR Jamieson Greer announced a deal after Geneva talks: US tariffs on Chinese imports dropped from 145% to 30%; China’s tariffs on US goods dropped from 125% to 10%. 115-percentage-point reduction massively de-escalates the April trade war and eases pressure on AI chip and component supply chains. via CNBC
  • OpenAI releases HealthBench. Open-source benchmark for evaluating LLM safety and performance in healthcare. Built with 262 physicians across 60 countries and 26 specialties: 5,000 multi-turn conversations with 48,562 unique rubric criteria. Reported scores: GPT-3.5 Turbo 16%, GPT-4o 32%, o3 60%; GPT-4.1 nano outperformed GPT-4o at 25x lower cost. via OpenAI
  • Trump departs for Middle East tour. First foreign trip of the second term to Saudi Arabia, Qatar and UAE. Bloomberg flagged the $600B Saudi investment package, Humain-NVIDIA/AMD chip deals and UAE G42 ‘AI Zone’ announcements that would land May 13-15. via Bloomberg
  • BIS new guidance bundled with the Diffusion Rule rescission. Three pieces: (1) using Huawei Ascend chips anywhere in the world violates US export controls, (2) diversion risks tied to training advanced AI in foreign countries, (3) protecting US AI tech from foreign-adversary access. Replacement rule deferred to a future Federal Register notice. via Hogan Lovells

Who shipped

OpenAI shipped HealthBench. BIS and Treasury shipped policy. Anthropic, Google DeepMind, Meta, xAI all quiet on the model side. DeepSeek, Qwen, Mistral also silent — the Qwen3 series had launched in late April; DeepSeek-V3-0324 in March.

Open-source pulse

HealthBench is the day’s open-source contribution — joins the recent open-evals stack (PaperBench Apr 2, CyberSecEval 4 Apr 29).

Money, infra & hardware

Washington Post and Bloomberg reported NVIDIA’s Jensen Huang and AMD’s Lisa Su would travel with the delegation; formal Humain partnerships and AMD’s $10B Saudi project would be announced in Riyadh Tuesday. The Diffusion Rule rescission is the enabling action.

Quiet corners

No verified May 12 release from DeepSeek, Alibaba/Qwen, Moonshot or other PRC labs. No frontier-model announcement from Anthropic, Google DeepMind, Meta or xAI.

By the numbers

  • 145% → 30% — US tariffs on Chinese imports under the 90-day truce
  • 125% → 10% — China tariffs on US goods
  • 115-pp — total reduction
  • 262 / 60 / 26 / 5,000 / 48,562 — HealthBench physicians / countries / specialties / conversations / rubric criteria
  • 3 days — until the Biden AI Diffusion Rule was scheduled to take effect
  • Most-mentioned company: OpenAI

Compiled by AI Feed’s editor from verified web sources for 12 May 2025.