The Trump administration plans to use a Pentagon-created AI program to set reference prices for critical minerals as it tries to assemble a global metals trading block, according to three sources with direct knowledge of the effort.
Vice President JD Vance proposed earlier this month that the US and more than 50 other countries impose “reference prices for critical minerals at each stage of production,” backed by adjustable tariffs intended to uphold what he called pricing integrity.
Sources said those reference prices would be generated by the Department of Defense’s Open Price Exploration for National Security AI metals program, a Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency initiative launched in 2023 to estimate what a metal should cost once labor, processing, and other inputs are included and alleged Chinese market manipulation is removed.
The administration’s first pricing focus would cover at least four minerals: germanium, gallium, antimony, and tungsten, before expanding to others, the sources said. S&P Global and Finnish data firm Rovjok are supplying data and technical assistance, according to the sources.
OPEN has been aimed since inception at metals that are thinly traded or not traded at all, where price discovery is limited and where manufacturers can struggle to determine whether quoted prices reflect supply-demand dynamics. China is the world’s largest miner or processor of many minerals the US designates as critical, and the backdrop described by sources is that Beijing has produced minerals at a loss to dampen prices, contributing to Western closures.
On the other hand, Chinese officials have said Beijing manages mineral exports in accordance with World Trade Organization rules.
The AI model is framed as a way to promote supply deals between Western miners and manufacturers by offering more pricing certainty. A reference antimony price set by OPEN and backed by a trade block could lift profits for US antimony developers, but could also raise input costs for automakers that use antimony in adhesives and other products.
Key mechanics remain unresolved in the plan as described: it was not immediately clear whether AI-derived prices would float or be fixed, or whether they would be negotiated bilaterally with specific allies or applied uniformly across the entire trading block.
The effort comes as the administration steps away from guaranteeing price floors for individual companies due to a lack of congressional funding, even as miners have sought that support.
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