Welcome to Foreign Policy’s China Brief. Every week, we cover the latest developments in the U.S.-China relationship, among other topics. But this week, we take a step back and discuss a broader trend: artificial intelligence and why it’s become such a fixation for China hawks over other areas of U.S.-China technology competition.
Why Washington Fixates on AI
In a speech delivered this month, U.S. Sen. Elissa Slotkin, a Democrat, called for a Manhattan Project-like effort for artificial intelligence, saying, “We are in a tech race with China … and there’s no area more important to win than on artificial intelligence.”
This belief in AI’s primacy is widely held in both Washington and Silicon Valley, including by U.S. President Donald Trump. But like many common ideas about both China and AI, it is wrong.
China is certainly competitive in AI, but it is not the most important part of the U.S.-China technology race. But AI is the only major field in which the United States is marginally ahead of China, rather than falling behind. More meaningful revolutions, meanwhile, are happening elsewhere.
Clean energy is the most prominent example of such revolutions. China leads the United States in technology including solar power, batteries, and electric vehicles. As a recent report shows, China is leveraging those advantages globally. Since 2022, it has invested more than $220 billion in clean energy overseas—a greater sum of inflation-adjusted capital than total U.S. investment in the Marshall Plan after World War II.
In the first half of this year, China installed 256 gigawatts of global solar energy capacity—more than double the rest of the world combined and more than 12 times what the United States managed (21 GW) in that time. That helps offset China’s role as the world’s largest carbon emitter; plus, solar energy is cheaper than fossil fuels most of the time and getting cheaper.
Or consider the field of biotechnology, in which discoveries are transforming medicine, agriculture, and industry every year. The United States has traditionally led the sector, but it is now falling behind China.
But as AI receives the lion’s share of attention in Washington, it has gained notoriety in recent years more for what it has promised than what it has actually achieved. Critics argue that the technology, like its predecessors blockchain and the metaverse, is overhyped—especially large language models such as ChatGPT, Grok, or DeepMind.
Much of the AI frenzy turns on the belief that artificial general intelligence, or AGI, is only a few years away. Experts generally disagree with this timeline, and evidence for it is weak. AI proponents have a record of being mistaken or exaggerating. Meanwhile, skepticism about AI is growing among researchers; so too is evidence of the technology’s adverse cognitive and economic side effects.
None of this means that AI doesn’t have potential or that other competitive technology sectors aren’t without their own potential harms. But it should pour cold water over claims that AI is the most important domain of U.S.-China tech competition.
So why do China hawks talk about the AI race over other technology sectors? Mostly because AI is one of the few scientific areas the White House isn’t actively waging war against—although the latest H-1B visa farce may change that. On Saturday, Trump announced a $100,000 fee for new visas granted to skilled foreign workers, which would be a seismic shift for the AI industry’s workforce.
Though the first Trump administration skirmished with scientists, the second has dealt what may be generational blows to U.S. scientific and research capacity. That is especially true when it comes to clean energy, as the White House is blocking renewable projects and putting its weight behind fossil fuels instead.
There is plenty of political maneuvering in Beijing, too, but the power struggles over clean energy happened to land on the opposite side. As Chinese President Xi Jinping moved to establish control over the Chinese Communist Party from 2013 to 2014, party bigwig Zhou Yongkang—who had deep ties to state-owned fossil fuel giants—was a major target.
That power struggle resulted in sweeping purges at state-owned enterprises such as Sinopec, which permanently weakened the fossil fuel lobby, especially as China has also cracked down on climate change denial.
Perhaps another reason that AI is the cause du jour in the United States is because AI funding is flowing through Washington just as crypto funding did before it. With so many federal grants gutted by the Trump administration, think tanks and analysts need any source of support that they can get.
More broadly, this fixation on AI is simply part of a cycle that has long shaped conversations about China in U.S. policy circles. China is a vast and complicated country, and hawks and doves alike have often simplified it into a digestible story to get things done, whether that story is “We must counter the Belt and Road” or “We have to work with China to fight climate change.”
In this respect, the AI race allows hawks to tell the story they’ve been telling all along. The technology is an area where the United States has a lead over China to maintain and one that plays to U.S. strengths, such as software, and not to weaknesses, such as manufacturing or skilled labor.
Plus, the industry for AI’s key manufacturing component, semiconductor chips, is chiefly controlled by Taiwan, a friend of the United States that is existentially threatened by China.
Contrast that with clean energy, where even getting back into the race would require of the United States vast financial commitments, a serious rethinking of its manufacturing and energy policies, and a nearly impossible political consensus. AI probably isn’t the most important part of the tech race—but it’s by far the easiest one to talk about.
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