The world’s major powers are locked into an artificial intelligence arms race. New rules announced by the White House this week seek to guarantee American supremacy in that race.
The outgoing Biden administration on Monday announced “unprecedented new export controls” to keep AI technology from falling into Chinese hands, said The Washington Post. The controls restrict the sale of AI-capable chips to “most countries in the world,” part of an effort to keep Beijing from repurchasing American-made chips sold to third-party countries. America “leads the world in AI now, both AI development and AI chip design, and it’s critical that we keep it that way,” Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo said of the new rules.
Biden is “rushing” to restrict AI chip exports because recent developments suggest that China is “catching up in the race” to create massively powerful AI systems, said Billy Perrigo at Time. The Chinese company DeepSeek recently released an open-source AI model that “outperformed any American open-source language model.” The development surprised officials “who had believed China lagged behind in terms of AI capabilities,” said Perrigo. The new rules are a “decisive move to make life much harder for China’s AI ecosystem,” said Greg Allen of the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
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The ‘contest for geopolitical superiority’
America and China are in “grim competition” with each other, and “both intend to be prepared for war,” Ezra Klein said at The New York Times. AI superiority is now seen as “central to both sides of the conflict.” DeepSeek’s new model is part of a new wave of AI systems that can be built cheaply and stored on personal computers. But calls for restraint in the AI arms race will probably take second place to the “contest for geopolitical superiority,” Klein said. America is the “leading power when it comes to artificial intelligence,” said Jake Sullivan, Biden’s national security advisor. “And we intend to keep it that way.”
To do that, the new rules “strangle competition” in the tech marketplace, Chris Stokel-Walker said at Fast Company. Banning exports to China “makes sense, given how integral AI will be to shaping our future.” But blocking exports to 120 other countries is harder to justify. That seems less about protecting America and “more like an overtly protectionist trade policy.” That makes it “more likely countries will look towards China” to power their own AI efforts, Stokel-Walker said.
How long will U.S. lead last?
It’s not just chip exports: Biden on Tuesday signed an executive order to ensure that AI data centers and clean-power facilities that supply them energy “can be built quickly and at scale,” said The Associated Press. “We will not let America be out-built” in the AI industry, Biden said.
American chipmaker Nvidia and the European Union have both “expressed their displeasure” with the new rules, said Karl Freund, founder and analyst at Cambrian-AI Research, at Forbes. The winner? Beijing. China’s chips are slower “but at least you can get them.” For AI developers in Africa, South America or Asia, the Biden administration rules mean Chinese technology might “become your best and perhaps only choice.” The new rules will slow down China’s AI development, Freund said. “But for how long?”
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