Tech experts recommend full steam ahead on US export controls for AI – CyberScoop
Technology experts pressed Congress to maintain export controls on semiconductor chips and other technologies, telling lawmakers Tuesday that the restrictions are among the most effective strategies to slow China and other rival countries in the AI race, thereby helping U.S. companies hold a competitive edge.
Placing export controls on these technologies is not new: both the Trump and Biden administrations have placed restrictions on Chinese companies’ ability to buy newer, more powerful computer chips that are powering the global AI industry.
However, this year’s emergence of multiple high-performance generative AI reasoning models from Chinese companies DeepSeek, Alibaba, Tencent and others has caused some to question whether those efforts were in vain. Experts who once thought the restrictions would ensure American AI dominance are now revisiting their views as China appears to have caught up to the U.S.
But during a House Science, Space and Technology Committee hearing, multiple technology experts advised the U.S. government to continue to impose new restrictions.
“I think an important question here is where might [China’s industry] be if U.S. policy had been different?” said Gregory Allen, director of the Wadhwani Center for AI and Advanced Technologies at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
Allen argued that previous export restrictions have and will continue to blunt China’s progress in developing more advanced AI models, particularly in the near- and intermediate-term as the Chinese government looks to stand up its own manufacturing capacity.
Previous export restrictions, he said, likely prevented these Chinese companies from making even further progress and potentially surpassing their competitors in the United States.
DeepSeek, he pointed out, was spun out of a Chinese high-frequency finance trading firm, an industry that is “obsessed with their computing infrastructure” because they’re “chasing nanosecond advantages in beating the market.” That pre-existing infrastructure and technical talent enabled firms like DeepSeek to operate without more advanced chips and larger computing capabilities. However, they will likely need access to those technologies to make the next leap in development.
Indeed, DeepSeek executives themselves have flagged a lack of computing power as one of their biggest challenges going forward. Last year, CEO Liang Wenfeng said in an interview that even top Chinese AI trainers need about twice the computing power compared to their Western counterparts to achieve the same performance.
Wenfeng also lamented the lack of a Chinese parallel to massive chip companies like NVIDIA, which he attributed to a collective effort by Western governments to support such industries.
“They saw the trend of the next generation of technology and had a roadmap in place. For China’s AI development, we also need such an ecosystem,” Wenfeng said, according to an English-translated version of his interview. “Many domestic chip projects can’t get off the ground because there’s no supporting technology community — only second-hand information. Someone in China has to stand on the frontier of innovation.”
While the release of DeepSeek has been compared to “Sputnik,” the Russian rocket that signaled the Soviet Union’s lead in the space race, one major difference is that DeepSeek was built with largely American-made technology.
“This gives us leverage in the form of export controls, and indeed DeepSeek’s founder said it best: the only thing holding them back is access to American chips,” said Tim Fist, director of emerging technology policy at the Institute for Progress.
Fist said the federal government needs a team of technical experts who can work with industry and the intelligence community to proactively study Chinese models and chips and facilitate quicker and more decisive actions around export controls.
Like others, Allen urged lawmakers to push for tighter controls in the future, and not to assume that the latest leap by Chinese AI firms represents a larger failure of previous controls.
In fact, he criticized the Biden administration for not being aggressive enough and for telegraphing specific controls ahead of time in a way that allowed Chinese firms to stockpile parts and components before the rules took effect.
“It’s not fun to have an aggressive export control policy,” Allen said, “but we are incurring all of the costs of a maximalist, aggressive export control policy and we are only incurring a fraction of the strategic potential benefits, because of the way that we are going about executing it.”
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