Trump Can Keep America's AI Advantage

This gives the incoming Trump administration a chance to establish a historic advantage for the U.S. and the free world.

AI will likely become the most powerful and strategic technology in history. By 2027, AI developed by frontier labs will likely be smarter than Nobel Prize winners across most fields of science and engineering. It will be able to use all the senses and interfaces of a human working virtually—text, audio, video, mouse, keyboard control and internet access—to complete complex tasks that would take people months or years, such as designing new weapons or curing diseases. Imagine a country of geniuses contained in a data center.

The nations that are first to build powerful AI systems will gain a strategic advantage over its development. Incoming Trump administration officials can take steps to ensure the U.S. and its allies lead in developing this technology. If they succeed, it could deliver breakthroughs in medicine, energy and economic development. It could also extend American military preeminence. If they fail, another nation—most likely China— could surpass us economically and militarily. It’s imperative that free societies with democratic oversight and the rule of law set the norms by which AI is employed. They won’t be able to do so if totalitarian governments pioneer these technologies.

Export controls, which ban shipments to China of the high-end chips needed to train advanced AI models, have been a valuable tool in slowing China’s AI development. These controls began during the first Trump term and expanded under the Biden administration to cover a wider range of chips and chip-manufacturing equipment. The controls appear to have been effective: The CEO of one of China’s leading AI firms recently said the main obstacle he faces is the embargo on high-end chips.

China is trying to work around U.S. controls, including by using shell companies to set up data centers in countries that can still import advanced U.S. chips. This enables China to train its AI models on state-of-the-art chips and catch up with U.S. competitors.

The Trump administration should shut down this avenue of circumvention. One solution is to ensure that data centers in countries that China might use to skirt export controls are allowed to access U.S.-designed AI chips only if they adhere to verifiable security standards and commit not to help China’s AI efforts. AI hardware exports should be tracked. We should also ensure that frontier AI remains under our security umbrella by keeping the largest and most critical AI data centers within the U.S. and its closest partners.

Skeptics of these restrictions argue that the countries and companies to which the rules apply will simply switch to Chinese AI chips. This argument overlooks that U.S. chips are superior, giving countries an incentive to follow U.S. rules. China’s best AI chips, the Huawei Ascend series, are substantially less capable than the leading chip made by U.S.-based Nvidia. China also may not have the production capacity to keep pace with growing demand. There’s not a single noteworthy cluster of Huawei Ascend chips outside China today, suggesting that China is struggling to meet its domestic needs and is in no position to export chips at a meaningful scale.

Because of America’s current restrictions on chip-manufacturing equipment, it will likely take China years if not decades to catch up in chip quality and quantity. The CEO of ASML, the world’s largest maker of semiconductor manufacturing equipment, has said that these restrictions will cause China to “lag 10 to 15 years behind the West” in high-end chip manufacturing. That could give the U.S. a head start during a critical window. Whoever advances most during the next four years will be in a much stronger position in the decades that follow, given that AI gains will likely compound on one another.

The export and security terms that the U.S. sets will define the chip market for producing powerful AI systems. Countries that want to reap the massive economic benefits will have an incentive to follow the U.S. model rather than use China’s inferior chips.

Along with implementing export controls, the U.S. will need to adopt other strategies to promote its AI innovation. President-elect Trump campaigned on accelerating AI data center construction by improving energy infrastructure and slashing burdensome regulations. These would be welcome steps. Additionally, the administration should assess the national security threats of AI systems and how they might be used against Americans. It should deploy AI within the federal government, both to increase government efficiency and to enhance national defense.

Mr. Trump has likened AI to a “superpower” and has underscored the importance of the U.S. staying “right at the forefront” of its race against China. His administration’s actions will help determine whether democracies or autocracies lead the next technological era. Our shared security, prosperity and freedoms hang in the balance.

Mr. Amodei is CEO and a cofounder of Anthropic, which makes the AI system Claude. Mr. Pottinger is chairman of the China program at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. He served as U.S. deputy national security adviser, 2019-21.