Treasury proposes outbound investment rules
On 22 October 2026 the US Department of the Treasury issued a proposed rule to implement the Comprehensive Outbound Investment National Security (COINS) Act, enacted on 18 December 2025 inside the defense authorization act for fiscal 2026. The rule would require notification of some investments by US persons in foreign companies in sensitive technologies and prohibit others: semiconductors, quantum technologies, super intelligence systems, hypersonic systems, high-performance computing and biotechnology. Comments are open until 7 December 2026.
Why it matters
The Act puts a programme that rested on a 2023 executive order on a statutory footing, and the proposed rule changes the approach to AI. Under the 2024 rules AI systems were told apart by training compute and by purpose: some fell under a prohibition, some under notification, the rest outside the programme. Under the proposal developing any super intelligence (SI) system is prohibited and no notification category exists for SI, because, in the Treasury's words, "no single measure, benchmark, or threshold" any longer separates advanced models. The press release does not say this: it only lists the sectors.
What the pages say. The Treasury's release of 22 October 2026: the department "today issued" a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (NPRM) updating the Outbound Investment Security Program on the basis of the COINS Act; the Act names five sectors (semiconductors and microelectronics, artificial intelligence systems, quantum information technologies, high-performance computing and supercomputing, hypersonic systems) and the Secretary added biotechnology. The programme page says the Act was enacted on 18 December 2025 and comments are due on 7 December 2026. The proposal was published in the Federal Register on 26 October 2026 (91 FR 67396-67433, FR Doc. 2026-21786, docket TREAS-DO-2026-0595, RIN 1505-AC94), 38 pages. It adds a new part 851 to 31 CFR that requires US persons to notify transactions with foreign persons engaged in "notifiable technologies" and prohibits transactions with foreign persons engaged in a "prohibited technology". For AI, Sec. 851.226(h) makes "development of any SI system" a prohibited technology, with provisos on the use of off-the-shelf third-party systems; Sec. 851.232 defines an SI system as a machine-based system that for human-defined objectives generates content or makes predictions, recommendations or decisions, together with software and hardware that operate on it, including an "SI agent harness" and embodied systems (robots, unmanned systems). Footnote 1 to that section explains the words "super intelligence" by Executive Order 14434; the Act and the 2024 rules say "artificial intelligence". What the record does not claim. It is a proposal: final rules have not been issued and will set their own effective date. The order is not named as the cause of the rule's content: the footnote only explains the choice of words. Of the 38 pages the introduction, the reasoning for super intelligence systems, the definitions and the paragraphs on prohibited technologies were read; the sections on other sectors, exceptions, penalties and the cost analysis were not worked through, and the record does not say which countries and persons are covered beyond the 2024 rules' naming of the PRC, Hong Kong and Macau as the country of concern.