Did America just lose the AI race to China?

"In 2022, Jake Sullivan, then national security adviser under President Joe Biden and a powerful figure in the White House's foreign policy team, assembled an interagency planning exercise out of the Situation Room: What were all the possible circumstances and outcomes of an AI arms race between the US and China - from trade wars to real wars, possibly even the arrival of AGI - and how would the federal government respond?"

"Sullivan, now a professor at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government, is definitively pro-artificial intelligence and pro-innovation. But he thinks about AI in a way that a former national security adviser would: as a means to gain a geopolitical advantage against adversaries like China. His decision at the time was to place tight controls on the high-end chips that American companies were allowed to sell to China, extending a policy that dates back to the Cold War: Don't sell high-end tech to America's foreign enemies."

In 2022 Jake Sullivan organized an interagency Situation Room simulation to map possible outcomes of an AI arms race between the US and China, including trade wars, real wars, and the possible arrival of AGI. The details and results of that simulation are classified. Sullivan acknowledged that the exercise did not factor in the possibility that export controls would be rolled back. Sullivan supports AI and innovation but frames AI as a tool for geopolitical advantage against adversaries like China. He imposed tight controls on high-end chips sold to China, extending Cold War–era export policy amid strong tech industry backlash.

Read at The Verge