The next U.S. presidential administration will face a host of emerging technology issues in international trade, including advanced computing chips, artificial intelligence, cloud computing, data centers, quantum and telecommunications infrastructure, said Nazak Nikakhtar, a Wiley Rein partner and a former acting Bureau of Industry and Security undersecretary.

The U.K. will officially launch a new agency Oct. 10 to oversee civil enforcement of certain sanctions and trade restrictions for controlled goods and services moving or being provided outside the U.K. The new Office of Trade Sanctions Implementation, first unveiled last year (see 2312110016), will investigate and impose fines on U.K. sanctions violators and introduce new reporting requirements for businesses, potentially to include information about their due diligence practices.

Congress should consider encouraging greater use of export controls and sanctions to counter a recent surge in the repression of political dissent abroad, hearing witnesses told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee last week.

The Bureau of Industry and Security could use more export enforcement agents abroad and better analytical tools to track illegal shipments, said Matthew Axelrod, the agency’s top export enforcement official. He also said companies should expect BIS to continue to issue large corporate enforcement penalties for export control violations.

A new final rule issued by the Bureau of Industry and Security this week will codify a host of updates the agency made to its administrative enforcement policies over the past three years, including measures to help BIS more quickly resolve minor voluntary disclosures and increase penalties on exporters who choose not to report serious violations. Other changes will give BIS broader discretion to impose higher fines, including by eliminating language that had capped maximum base civil penalties for “non-egregious” violations.

The Office of Foreign Assets Control unveiled an interim final rule this week that will extend the agency’s sanctions-related record-keeping requirements from five years to 10 years. The rule, effective in mid-March, will align the agency’s record-keeping rules with a similar expansion of the statute of limitations for civil and criminal violations of U.S. sanctions as part of a bill passed by Congress and signed into law earlier this year (see 2407220022 and 2404290071).

U.S. computing chip manufacturers told a congressional panel this week that they’re increasing their scrutiny of products that have ended up in Russian weapons used in Ukraine.

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The House approved several export control-related bills late Sept. 9, including the Remote Access Security Act, which is designed to close a loophole that has allowed China to use cloud service providers to access advanced U.S. computing chips remotely (see 2409040046).

U.S. computing chip manufacturers need to do more to stem the flow of their export-controlled products to Russia’s defense industrial base, Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., said Sept. 10.