Comment by American Compass

Any export of advanced AI chips or chipmaking equipment to China must be understood as supporting its military, either by empowering its leading AI labs or by directly providing computing power to the People’s Liberation Army (PLA). Ultimately, the dual-use nature of AI makes civilian/military distinctions meaningless—a reality the CCP will exploit through its Military-Civil Fusion approach to critical technology. The same AI capabilities used in commercial markets to optimize supply chains can be used to coordinate military logistics; the same optical systems used to inspect factories can guide weapons. With trillions of dollars of potential value on the table, from both sales of AI chips and AI-driven productivity gains across sectors, the economic stakes are also extremely high. At best, selling advanced AI chips to China would mean accelerating China’s economic progress and strengthening its competitiveness relative to America’s. At worst, it would mean selling the Chinese Communist Party the rope with which to hang the United States, its allies, and the democratic world broadly, trading away our hard-earned advantage for short-sighted, short-term gains today. The United States must act quickly to assert an America First chip export strategy. The guiding principle of a truly America First strategy is simple, sensible, and urgent: prohibit the sale of advanced AI chips and manufacturing equipment to China, working with allies to prioritize American and allied control of advanced AI capacity.