This has a long history and the US government are not completely stupid. They understand that some cornerstone technologies are high leverage even if they are not per se directly militarily relevant.

Some classic examples of this, on which the US places severe export controls, was advanced materials science and inertial navigation technology. Neither of these are weapons but advanced technology in these domains greatly enables the development of advanced weapons. Any work in these areas is automatically subject to the full export control regime. In extreme cases they may be nationalized and classified.

AI tech is becoming just another tech domain subject to the same level of scrutiny. I’m not making a moral judgement. This was always going to be the reality and a lot of people could see it coming.

Another one is thermal vision cameras. Anything above 9fps (I guess an arbitrary cutoff to do with night-vision goggles) is export controlled. This is despite the technology being very valuable for many industrial and hobby applications.