Trump administration builds AI-powered ‘detective border’ to catch tariff cheats

The US government is deploying artificial intelligence to solve a problem that’s been vexing trade enforcers for years: figuring out whether a product labeled “Made in Vietnam” actually spent most of its life in a Chinese factory. The Trump administration’s new AI system, dubbed the “detective border,” is designed to identify and intercept goods that are illegally rerouted through third countries to dodge US tariffs on Chinese products. A report from the White House Office of Trade and Manufacturing Policy, released on August 13, 2026, names more than 40 countries as participants in what amounts to a global game of tariff hide-and-seek. The scale of the problem The numbers explain why Washington decided to throw machine learning at this. According to estimates from AI supply chain firm Exiger, roughly $75 billion worth of goods may have been illegally transshipped between February 2025 and February 2026. The resulting hit to the US Treasury: somewhere between $19 billion and $34 billion in lost tariff revenue. The White House report identifies the usual suspects and some surprising ones. Mexico, Canada, the European Union, India, Japan, and South Korea all made the list of top enab...