Comment by Paul Scharre

The United States has two asymmetric advantages over China in AI: chips and human talent. U.S. companies occupy critical chokepoints in the supply chain for manufacturing high-end chips, especially in the electronic design automation software used to manufacture advanced chips. Collectively, the United States, Japan, and the Netherlands control 90 percent of the global market for semiconductor manufacturing equipment. The United States has used this leverage, in concert with Japan and the Netherlands, to deny China access to leading-edge AI chips by prohibiting the export to China of any advanced chips made using United States technology. Given the dominance of U.S. companies in semiconductor manufacturing equipment chokepoints, United States export controls have, in the near term, successfully denied China access to the cutting-edge AI chips used to train the largest and most capable AI models. To fully capitalize on this advantage, however, the United States must take several additional steps.