Whether it is war, the Byton administration is betting on a high-risk bet that the United States can use its leverage to stop China from retreating and that it is worth it in terms of the loss of US exports to China and bilateral relations that the United States abandons. On the one hand, it was a gamble, and it relied on ideas established in Washington decades ago. Since the Cold War, U.S. policymakers have been using technical restrictions to hinder China’s military modernization and punish countries that violate human rights. Recent advances in missile and surveillance technology reinforce this logic. But several people in the Biden administration say that a newer focus is also behind the big bet.
Key officials believe that AI is approaching a turning point or several turning points, which may bring a country’s main military and economic advantages. Some believe that self-improvement systems or so-called artificial universal intelligence may be within the scope of technology. The risk of China reaching these thresholds first is too great to ignore.
The explanation of how the Biden administration chose to respond was based on interviews with more than a dozen U.S. officials and policy experts, some of whom discussed the internal government deliberations anonymously.
huawei
When the Biden administration introduced its transformative policies, it did not start from scratch. During his first term, President Donald Trump also targeted Chinese technology, including semiconductor companies, as part of a broader effort to curb the country’s technological rise and global reach.
In 2019, the Ministry of Commerce added Chinese IT giant Huawei to its physical list, effectively cutting it from the US supply chain, including chips, unless it is granted a special license. It is justifiable for officials to accuse Huawei of violating U.S. sanctions against Iran. But experts believe they are also trying to destroy companies more generally, fearing that Huawei’s export of 5G wireless infrastructure around the world could put Chinese spies and saboteurs in their arms.
The Trump administration then doubled, this time by turning to an obscure legal provision called “the direct product rule for foreign production.” FDPR was originally designed to ensure that merchandise made through U.S. innovation and technology, such as missiles or aircraft parts, would not enter weapons systems sold to opponents, even if these systems were built abroad. As Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross said at the time, in 2020, the Trump administration transformed this long-arm tool into Huawei, explicitly targeting the company’s “effort to acquire advanced semiconductors developed or produced from U.S. software and technology.”
Although FDPR has been used to enforce multilateral weapons controls, the actions against Huawei are targeting “items made with U.S. technology are insensitive and have nothing to do with AI,” said Kevin Wolf, a former Obama administration’s export control official.
“Everyone thinks this will be the end of this very novel extraterritorial control,” Wolf added. Instead, the U.S. government found the FDPR irresistible. Later, it will turn it to Russia after its invasion of Ukraine in 2022 and eventually wield it to limit China’s high-power calculations. “Obviously, we started using it like candy,” Estevez said. “It is certainly threatened to use it, if not actually use it.”
