“When it comes to emerging technology, you cannot be both in China’s camp and our camp.”
Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo described the global competition for supremacy in artificial intelligence (AI) this way last April. She’s right, and the Biden administration has taken important steps to restrict China’s access to advanced AI capabilities, from banning the sale of advanced chips last year to formulating restrictions on the export of certain AI models.
But these steps miss another important and overlooked problem: American Big Tech companies also threaten U.S. national security by providing technology to entities linked to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). The U.S. government must take concrete steps to rein in Microsoft, Amazon and other tech firms that conduct business with these firms in ways that harm our national security.
The computing power required to train artificial intelligence models is inherently a “dual use” technology. It has many harmless commercial purposes, but China has seized on it for cyberwarfare and other military applications.
How does China access such resources? While entities can no longer buy advanced AI chips directly from American companies like NVIDIA, China can bypass these sanctions by purchasing them remotely via the cloud services sold by Microsoft, Google and Amazon.
Raimondo recognized this gaping hole in our sanctions. “We use export controls on chips,” she said, “but........