Roughly a fifth of Apple’s iPhones are sold in China. Repeat the previous anecdote over and over again, and ideally convey it to Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei and Matt Pottinger, chairman of the China program at Foundation for Defense of Democracies.
Recently the duo penned an opinion piece asserting that “Legislators on both sides of the aisle recognize that the U.S. must lead the world in artificial intelligence to preserve national security.” There’s no evidence or logic supporting such a claim. See above.
It’s not just that what’s designed in Cupertino is easily accessible at a market price in China, it’s that all global production is available globally. If countries are fully open, or even partially open to foreign production, the latter is the equivalent of all the world’s production taking place next door. Stated simply, if you’re selling what you produce, you’re trading with the world.
Amodei and Pottinger believe that the U.S. must lead in AI, but that’s no more rational than saying that the U.S. must lead in banana production. In each instance, the production of a market good is made available to the world as though it was produced in parts of the world where it’s being sold.
Easily the best evidence in support of the above claim can be found in U.S. technology companies feverishly working to discover the future of AI. In 2025 alone, Google and Amazon plan to respectively spend $75 and $100 billion on AI and AI-adjacent investment. And they’re hardly alone.
About these massive capital outlays by U.S.-based companies, does anyone seriously think their shareholders would allow them to expend such copious sums if their intent was to sit on the market-oriented advances discovered? Hopefully the question answers itself, at which point it should and will be said that what U.S. technological innovators produce will be made available to the rest of the world as though it was created in the rest of the world.
Importantly, what’s true about American innovation is also true about what takes place in China. See DeepSeek. It quickly became a global story a few weeks ago not just because the quality of the app rivaled some of the best-known American names, but because Americans were rapidly downloading it for usage as though – yes – it had been created right in northern California.
About DeepSeek’s advance, it was noted at the time that AI app was created with less powerful Nvidia chips since export controls had limited what Nvidia could export to “China.” This rates mention since Amodei and Pottinger believe that “The U.S. needs proactive development efforts and strong export controls.” The CEO and the scholar err twice, at least.
For one, short of Nvidia ceasing sales of its chips altogether, they’ll reach China if the producers there want to utilize them. In other words, superfluous rules crafted by politicians can limit whom Nvidia sells to, but not those Nvidia sells to. Second, the quickest way to stunt the growth of AI in both the U.S. and China would be for both countries to do as Amodei and Pottinger wish whereby they place the discovery of future innovation in the hands of politicians. Industrial policy fails, always and everywhere.
Most troubling of all is the underlying thinking informing what Amodei and Pottinger want to do. They aim for export controls as part of a bigger “national security” strategy, when in reality trade among producers is easily the most peaceful concept ever conceived by mankind. Which means we should be grateful for free-flowing markets that will work around their central plans, along with shareholders who would never allow companies invested in to limit their genius solely to the country they’re headquartered in.
