Congress should share, not shield, US artificial intelligence tech

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China recently made a major move in its ongoing tech race against the U.S. The Chinese unveiled the fastest supercomputer in human history, called LineShine.

Before this week, the U.S. had held that honor, thanks to its El Capitan machine at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California. China’s victory is more symbolic than anything else, but it does raise an important question: How was China able to pull this off despite years of increasingly stringent U.S. export restrictions?

The U.S. imposes significant restrictions on tech exports to China, including on graphics processing units, as well as the machines used to manufacture them. These units provide supercomputers with the enormous processing power they need to function.

Yet China’s LineShine record-holder doesn’t use graphics processing units. It effectively worked around American trade barriers by relying on a massive network of standard microprocessors.

Therein lies a lesson for the U.S. Washington is trying to hobble the Chinese tech industry by blocking it from importing U.S.-made semiconductors and other products. Yet as LineShine shows, these restrictions haven’t always worked; oftentimes, they’ve just forced China to adapt.

The same point could be seen earlier this year when the federal government reversed course on whether Nvidia could export its H20 chips to be used in sophisticated Chinese AI models.

The Trump administration commendably recognized that if the Chinese were going to develop AI, they ought to at least use American chips.

Unfortunately, Beijing told the Americans: “thanks but no thanks.” In the face of restrictions on H20 imports, the Chinese had already developed homegrown alternatives.

China is effectively working around Washington’s restrictions by shoring up its own domestic tech industry. It’s focusing on scale, elevating itself to global leader on everything the U.S. tries to prevent it from importing or manufacturing.

It’s a smart strategy. America should take a cue.

There’s room for restrictions in the tech race, given that China is widely considered a national security threat. But restrictions alone are not how America secures either its sovereignty or its economic future.

If Washington’s answer is simply to classify more and more technology as exports and wall it off from the rest of the world, America risks losing the very competition it is trying to win.

That is precisely why Congress should think twice before expanding export controls even further through proposals like the Remote Access Security Act. The bill doesn’t simply prevent sensitive technologies and high-risk use cases from flowing into China. Instead, it aims to prohibit U.S. providers from offering services to any companies that employ Chinese nationals, regardless of how benign their underlying tech may be or whether their corporate customers are based in allied countries.

That’s an extraordinarily broad approach that risks shrinking the reach of American technology rather than expanding it. The bill would make U.S. platforms less attractive to international customers.

And those customers aren’t going to stop using AI simply because Washington makes American services more difficult to access. They’ll migrate elsewhere. Every customer Washington drives away from American cloud providers is another customer Huawei doesn’t have to win on the merits.

We shouldn’t be handing Chinese technology companies new business through our own policy mistakes. That’s not containing China’s influence. It’s helping China expand.

The real objective shouldn’t simply be keeping American technology away from China. It should be making sure the rest of the world keeps building on American technology instead of Chinese alternatives. Winning the AI race isn’t just about denying access. It’s about dominating adoption.

Just as China is strengthening its domestic tech manufacturing, the U.S. should be doing the same.

There’s a firm foundation to build on here. It is often lamented that the U.S. invented the semiconductor, only to see its innovation and production shift to East Asia. But since Congress passed the CHIPS Act in 2022, the U.S. has been pushing back, treating semiconductors as a matter of industrial policy and onshoring their production.

A Taiwanese company is building a $165 billion semiconductor manufacturing campus in the Arizona desert, one of the most lucrative construction projects on earth. This shows the potential for domestic growth among U.S. companies too.

The United States has deep and abiding advantages over Chinese tech, from its ability to attract talent to its formidable base of venture capital. The U.S. tech industry is also far more privatized than China’s state-controlled system, allowing for dollars to more easily and efficiently chase new ideas. It just needs to leverage these plusses to its benefit.

Owning the world’s fastest supercomputer won’t determine who wins the AI race. Becoming the platform the rest of the world relies on will.

Washington should spend less time building barriers around American innovation and more time making sure the world keeps choosing it over China.

Ram Bala is an associate professor of AI and Analytics at the Leavey School of Business, Santa Clara University.

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