Trump administration to use Pentagon AI to set mineral reference prices — gallium and germanium among first four targets
The AI pricing tool purports to cut Chinese manipulation out of critical minerals markets.
The Trump administration plans to use a Pentagon-developed AI program to set reference prices for critical minerals, including gallium and germanium, as part of a broader effort to build a global metals trading bloc, Reuters reported on February 24, citing three sources with direct knowledge of the effort.
The program in question is DARPA's Open Price Exploration for National Security (OPEN), launched in 2023 to calculate what a metal should cost once labor, processing, and other inputs are factored in and alleged Chinese market manipulation is stripped out.
According to Reuters' sources, the administration intends to use OPEN's pricing model as the backbone for the reference price system that Vice President JD Vance proposed at a Critical Minerals Ministerial in Washington on February 4, where more than 50 countries were represented. Vance proposed that member nations adopt reference prices for critical minerals "at each stage of production," enforced by adjustable tariffs.
Trump officials are initially focusing OPEN's model on four minerals: germanium, gallium, antimony, and tungsten, with S&P Global and Finnish data firm Rovjok supplying data and technical assistance, the sources said. Gallium, in compounds such as gallium nitride (GaN) and gallium arsenide (GaAs), is used in compound semiconductors found in RF chips and power electronics, while germanium is used in chip doping, fiber optics, and high-speed microelectronics.
China controls an estimated 60% to 80% of global germanium production and the U.S. Department of Energy has reported that the United States relies on China for roughly 95% of its gallium supply. Beijing imposed export licensing requirements on both metals in August 2023, then escalated to an outright ban on shipments to the U.S. in December 2024, before partially suspending that ban in November 2025 amid broader trade negotiations.
OPEN has been focused from its inception on metals that are thinly traded or not actively exchange-traded, where manufacturers struggle to determine whether quoted prices reflect actual supply-and-demand conditions rather than subsidized Chinese output. The program is scheduled to be transferred to the non-profit Critical Minerals Forum next year.
Not everyone is convinced the tariff-backed pricing model will hold. "You can try to set something approximating a price floor, but ultimately the trade barriers aren't going to guarantee someone on the other side of that tariff wall an actual price floor because multiple producers are still going to compete on price," Nathaniel Horadam, a former U.S. Department of Energy staffer who managed critical minerals lending programs across both the Biden and Trump administrations, told Reuters.
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The plan also raises questions around scope, particularly because current tariff structures could potentially apply to finished products containing these minerals, though the administration has not clarified that. In any case, whether introducing AI-powered analysis to the already tumultuous climate for international trade can help level the playing field remains to be seen.
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Luke James is a freelance writer and journalist. Although his background is in legal, he has a personal interest in all things tech, especially hardware and microelectronics, and anything regulatory.
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Dementoss Trusting AI to do something really important, that's the rare earths market going to be screwed-up by the Trump administration.Reply -
VizzieTheViz I don’t see why they’d need AI for this, but reducing dependency on a single supplier (and one you’re none to friendly with at that) for any important resource seems like a sound idea.Reply
Probably a case of even a broken clock being right twice a day, but I’d rather see the US government doing things like this than picking fights with its allies. -
King_V What could POSSIBLY go wrong? I mean, it's not like there'd be any sort of "I'm going to tinker with the guts of the AI algorithm so that I get the results I want," right? Because nobody adjacent to this administration has EVER done that.Reply -
jp7189 AI doesnt mean LLM. Using multiple data points to infer another data point. Thats all. They could've said "big data", but AI is the fun buzzword of the day.Reply -
timsSOFTWARE I understand why they are doing it, but it's kind of ironic at the same time. They aim to counter a nation that uses centralized control of the economy, with centralized pricing control over certain critical minerals.Reply -
Why_Me Reply
The word 'allies' is subjective anymore.VizzieTheViz said:I don’t see why they’d need AI for this, but reducing dependency on a single supplier (and one you’re none to friendly with at that) for any important resource seems like a sound idea.
Probably a case of even a broken clock being right twice a day, but I’d rather see the US government doing things like this than picking fights with its allies. -
nogames Wait. The government setting prices on commodities! This was extensively used in communist countries.Reply