China Emerges as Common Adversary for Washington and Silicon Valley

(SeaPRwire) –   On Tuesday, when Silicon Valley executives and federal lawmakers convened at the Hill and Valley Forum—a conference aimed at narrowing the divide between Big Tech and Washington—artificial intelligence was the central focus of the entire event.

Even though they’ve had a historically tense relationship over technology regulation, executives and lawmakers agreed that the AI competition has turned into a fight for survival, and one recurring concern in almost every session was China.

Senator Rick Scott (R-FL), who addressed the session titled “The Operating System for Institutions: Money, Workflows, and AI,” described winning the AI race as a life-or-death issue.

“We are competing against China. The government of China wants to destroy our way of life. When they wake up every day [they think], ‘how can the American way of life be destroyed?’” Scott said, adding he believes that Iran and Russia think the same way. “We got to put ourselves in a position that we can outcompete, especially China, with regard to AI.”

Yet, beneath this apparent united stance against China, there was an underlying conflict between lawmakers and Silicon Valley: should U.S.-based firms keep their cutting-edge technology within the country? The unmentioned company at the center of discussions was Nvidia, which recently received approval from both U.S. and Chinese authorities to sell advanced AI chips to China.

Exports are just one piece of the problem: smugglers are now stealing Nvidia’s technology to sell to China via indirect channels. Last week, the co-founder of hardware maker Supermicro was accused of organizing a plot to smuggle $2.5 billion worth of Nvidia microchips to China. In November, four individuals—two U.S. citizens and two Chinese citizens—were arrested for sending Nvidia chips to China through an international smuggling network.

House Speaker Rep. Mike Johnson (R-LA), the event’s keynote speaker, didn’t explicitly name China, but repeatedly asked the audience of tech executives to “keep American technology American.” He then encouraged companies to keep their data centers, chips, and infrastructure inside the U.S. and “away from America’s adversaries and competitors.”

“We’re asking you, our builders and innovators, to accept some minor constraints, relative to competitors in foreign countries, but I’ve always believed that some minor friction from high standards is at the heart of operating in a nation that is built upon the highest principles,” Johnson said.

Johnson’s keynote echoed the worries of other lawmakers and tech leaders, who shifted between referencing unnamed U.S. enemies and making direct warnings about China.

‘AI is an American birthright’

“This isn’t just a technological race, a fight over who’s going to get the best technology and win the AI race first, this is a moral fight,” said Sen. Jim Banks (R-IN) in a conversation with Palantir CTO Shyam Sankar entitled “Scale, Security, and Sovereignty: Competing with China’s Defense-Industrial Model.” “We know that the PRC (People’s Republic of China) is going to lie, steal, and cheat.”

Banks co-sponsored the bipartisan Guaranteeing Access and Innovation for National Artificial Intelligence (GAIN AI) Act, which would require U.S. companies to confirm that they offered domestic customers the chance to purchase advanced AI chips before exporting them. Under the Act, firms would also need a license to send advanced AI chips to “countries of concern.”

Sankar supported the defensive strategy but noted that the U.S. also needs to “go on the offensive.”

“By and large, AI is an American birthright. It came from the US. The Chinese only have it from distillation attacks,” Sankar said, referring to the technique of training a model on the outputs of a more advanced model to replicate its success. “The one place they have a marginal advantage is they’re a little bit more practical about what they’re trying to do with it. They view it as something to implement for economic advantage, while our labs are obsessed with this pursuit of AGI, which I’m glad we have an aspirational goal, like getting to Mars. But you know, there are places where this becomes a pathology.” He pointed to AI doomerism regarding mass job loss as one instance of this issue.

During another session, Keith Rabois, managing director of Khosla Ventures, stated that American business leaders should support the U.S. He noted that Khosla Ventures invests in companies that will have a “positive impact” on American society.

“We will not invest in things that would help our rivals. We don’t invest in China. We wouldn’t consider investing in China, because we are in an existential AI race, and whoever is the most successful with AI will dominate the economic future of the globe,” he said.

Partnership across sectors

In a speech called “Broken Bureaucracies vs. The Tyranny of Technologists: Who Will Save The West?,” Trae Stephens, co-founder of defense technology firm Anduril Industries, warned that if Washington and Silicon Valley fail to collaborate effectively, China will shape the country’s future. He contended that neither excessive government regulation nor unrestricted funding for Silicon Valley is the solution.

“These days, the government isn’t legislating much of anything at all,” Stephens said.

He referenced President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s decision to have Ford build over 18,000 B-24 bombers during World War II, as well as the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s creation of the internet’s direct predecessor.

“We’re playing catch-up here,” Stephens said. “In the early 2010s, when Chinese military documents first started talking about AI weapons, and CCP factionalists started posting about the idea of an industrial party, we were arguing about whether or not tech wanted to work with the Pentagon at all.”

He urged founders to question whether their products “strengthen the country that enables this success,” and encouraged government officials to think about how to utilize technology rather than control it.