We’re Letting China Steal Our Future

You know what a powerful influence AI could be—on our economy, our military, our society. You probably don’t know there’s something more powerful: China’s drive to steal technology and our utter failure to respond. AI is said by many to be the most important technology for the 21st century. Yet China takes our AI capabilities and we do nothing, just as we’ve done nothing for decades with other technologies. Last week, Anthropic accused Alibaba of illicitly extracting AI capabilities by training its inferior model on Anthropic’s superior model. This is hardly the first such accusation. In February, Open AI made a similar claim about DeepSeek. In April, there was a White House memo noting Chinese AI theft. A bipartisan House committee report did the same, in detail . The Trump administration  has repeatedly  insisted that the  US must outcompete China , and everyone else, in commercial AI. The Trump administration should not be taken seriously at all. Their policies include as key components letting China continue to leach American AI advances and, because somehow that’s not enough, selling China more advanced semiconductors to run their illicitly built models on. President Trump has been weak on China for so long that it’s tempting to say he’s solely at fault. But it goes far beyond him. You can argue the Biden administration was a bit tougher on China than Trump II and you can definitely argue that Trump I was tougher on China than Trump II. But neither was importantly different here. They talked loudly about Chinese theft and did nothing that mattered. It goes back farther—Presidents Obama, Bush, Clinton were also failures on this issue. Clinton’s excuse was a fairly minor threat—“piracy”—for most of his term, though he sounded just as silly as his successors. In the 2000’s, Bush watched while China stole core telecom technology from multiple firms, leading to the rise of Huawei. Motorola became a minor Chinese subsidiary, Lucent died, Nortel was plundered and died. Obama opted for, and stop me if this sounds familiar, a deal! With Xi Jinping! No more cybertheft of intellectual property. This was remarkably foolish on its own, but no more so than other presidents have been. And no more foolish than American business has been. Business wants Chinese technology theft and coercion to stop, but please don’t do anything to make China angry. And even now American firms work to give industries away . China has stolen and will steal because it’s been a gigantic, world-changing success. They’ve gotten clean away with it for more than 30 years, starting with “copy watches” and leading to transformative AI. Meanwhile, the US has progressed all the way from thinking more rounds of talks with no teeth will do the trick to thinking more list of bad actors with no teeth will do the trick. The cumulative value of China’s annual GDP over the past 30 years exceeds $225 trillion. The number is of course weighted to recent years with a larger economy, one which is more advanced and competitive around the world technologically. China couldn’t have so quickly reached this size and, especially, competitiveness without unprecedented coercive acquisition of foreign technology. It would otherwise be years behind, say at its 2019 technology level. In this particular sense, China’s theft has already been worth tens of trillions of dollars or soon will be. The only possible deterrent is for the US to treat it for what it is—criminal activity harming our country. If Alibaba, Deep Seek, or others are indeed stealing American AI technology, all their commercial activity in the US and around the world should be treated by us as illicit. You don’t get to steal, then walk around free. This ends my fantasy policy for the month. Of course we won’t do anything even in the ballpark of that. We can’t pass modest first steps in the Congress due to White House opposition . And if Congress surprisingly acted, the executive would just ignore the new law, as it has done before concerning China. We better hope AI is overrated, that it will turn out not to be vital. If it is vital, then China is again robbing us while we watch, will again roll out decent-to-good systems while spending much less, and will again (it’s such a mystery how they can do it) be more competitive than us. AI may or may not be transformative. One thing has already been transformative: the US letting China steal away our future. The post We’re Letting China Steal Our Future appeared first on American Enterprise Institute - AEI .