A bipartisan group of lawmakers on Wednesday vowed to keep Chinese artificial intelligence systems out of federal agencies while pledging to ensure the U.S. will prevail against China in the global AI competition.
“We are in a new Cold War, and AI is the strategic technology at the center,” said Rep. John Moolenaar, the Republican chair of the House Select Committee on China, as he opened a hearing on the matter. “The future balance of power may very well be determined by who leads in AI.”
The hearing on Capitol Hill comes about five months after a Chinese technology startup called DeepSeek introduced an AI model that rivaled platforms from OpenAI and Google in performance, but cost only a fraction to build. This raised concerns that China was catching up to the U.S. despite restrictions on chips and other key technologies used to develop AI.
The ever-tighter race is now a central part of the U.S.-China rivalry. And so much is at stake that the U.S. must win, witnesses told the congressional panel.
The two countries are “in a long-term techno-security competition that will determine the shape of the global political order for the coming years,” said Thomas Mahnken, president and CEO of the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments.
Jack Clark, cofounder and head of policy at Anthropic, told the committee that AI has built-in values.
“I know that AI systems are a reflection of the societies they are built from. AI built in democracies will lead to better technology for all of humanity. AI built in authoritarian nations will . . . be inescapably intertwined and imbued with authoritarianism,” Clark said. “We must take decisive action to ensure America prevails.”
Earlier this year, Chris Lehane, OpenAI’s head of global affairs, told reporters in Paris that the U.S. and China were the only two countries in the world that could build AI at scale. The competition, which he described as one between democratic AI and autocratic AI, is “very real and very serious,” and the stakes are “enormous,” he said, for “the global rails of AI will be built by one of those two countries.”
The 2025 AI Index Report by Stanford University’s Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence center has the U.S. in the lead in producing top AI models. But the report notes China is rapidly closing the performance gap, reaching near parity in 2024 on several major benchmarks. It also shows that China leads in AI publications and patents.
At the hearing, Clark urged the lawmakers to maintain and strengthen export controls of advanced chips to China. “This competition fundamentally runs on compute,” he said. The U.S. must control the flow of powerful chips to China, Clark said, “or else you’re giving them the tools they will need to build powerful AI to harm American interests.”
Mark Beall Jr., president of government affairs at The AI Policy Network, said there are “a number of very glaring gaps” in the U.S. export controls that have allowed China to obtain controlled chips. Lawmakers earlier this year introduced a bill to track such chips to ensure they would not be diverted to the wrong hands.
In another legislative step, Republican and Democratic lawmakers in both the House and the Senate on Wednesday introduced a bill to ban Chinese AI systems in the federal government.
“The U.S. must draw a hard line: Hostile AI systems have no business operating inside our government,” Moolenaar said.
The No Adversarial AI Act, as proposed, seeks to identify AI systems developed by foreign adversaries and ban their use in the U.S. government, with exceptions for use in research and counter-terrorism.
—By Didi Tang, Associated Press
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