Hearings to examine China's challenge to American AI leadership.
East Asian and Pacific Affairs
2025-12-02
Source: Congress.gov
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All right, this hearing of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Subcommittee on East Asia Pacific and the International Cybersecurity Policy will come to order. Before I begin, I want to go over a few ground rules. There will be zero tolerance for protests or any efforts to communicate with witnesses or any of the senators here. If you choose to do so to disrupt this hearing, you will be arrested immediately and barred from the committee for one year. We invite the public to attend, but we also have important business to attend to. With that said, we welcome everyone here today and thank our witnesses for agreeing to testify. We will begin with opening statements from myself, followed by the ranking members, Senator Coons, and then we will hear from our witnesses. Following the testimonies, we will move to five minute rounds of questions. And with that, I will go ahead and begin. Almost 70 years ago, Sputnik launched the greatest technological competition in US history. The space race with the Soviet Union transformed global science and reshaped the Cold War. Today we face a similar contest, this time with communist China and even higher stakes. Artificial intelligence will revolutionize daily life and its military uses will shape the global balance of power. Beijing is racing to fuse civilian AI with its military to seize the next revolution in military affairs. However, unlike the moon landing, the finish line in the AI race is far less clear. For the US, it may be achieving artificial general intelligence, human level, or greater machine cognition. Communist China, by contrast, is focused on rapidly diffusing AI across industry, manufacturing, robotics, and smart cities. These diverging visions were made clear this summer when both the US and Communist China released new AI strategies.
The Trump administration's AI action plan centers on openness, markets, and liberal norms, cutting red tape, building data centers, and other AI infrastructure, exporting our full AI technology stack, including hardware, models, software, applications, and standards to allies and partners, countering Beijing and international forum, and enforcing export controls. Beijing's AI Plus strategy champions state control sovereignty, and sustained high-level diplomacy to shape the global environment. What's at stake is simple, a US-led future that benefits the free world, or a China-led AI order that reshapes the global system in line with their authoritarian values. The risk could not be higher. This race will be won by who attracts the best talent, wields the best chips, and trains the best algorithms. America's early lead rests in large part on our dominance of global compute power. At the core of compute are advanced AI chips, the best of which are made by American companies. Denying Beijing access to these chips is therefore essential. President Trump had the foresight in his first administration to restrict specialized semiconductor manufacturing equipment from being sold to Communist China. Without cutting edge tools, Chinese fabs produced AI chips that are inferior to ours. Today, our top chips are roughly five times more powerful than theirs, and we manufacture them at 10 times the annual scale. Further controls by the Trump and Biden administrations on advanced AI chips have forced Chinese AI companies to smuggle U.S. chips to keep up. If we sustain these limits while U.S. firms innovate and diffuse our technology globally, our compute lead will widen exponentially. That's why Senator Coons and I plan to introduce the Safe Chips Act. This legislation would put in statute the Trump administration's current red lines on what AI chips are allowed to be sold to communist China for 30 months to preserve our edge.
Xi Jinping has made clear he has no intention of remaining reliant on American technology. The CCP's recent Fourth Plenum doubled down on the goal of technological self-reliance. The US and our allies, including the Netherlands, Taiwan, Japan, and South Korea, control nearly every critical mode of the supply chain, which is the most complex in human history. This is a structural advantage that Beijing cannot easily overcome. Together, we must collectively enforce semiconductor export controls and close loopholes so Xi Jinping, Xi's strategy fails. To win the AI race, we must also confront our vulnerabilities. Compute alone is not enough, and Communist China has advantages elsewhere. AI data centers require massive energy. Communist China generates twice the electricity we do and is rapidly expanding capacity while our grid ages. China leads in domestic AI adoption and is exporting its tech globally while US adoption lags. It produces 27 million more STEM graduates per decade than the US, even as we face an AI talent shortage. Communist China now leads in open AI models, accelerating diffusion of its technology, standards, and influence. It also dominates critical minerals and rare earth elements, which are the lifeblood of AI tech and hardware. Communist China completely controls the sector with near monopolies in magnets, cobalt, and lithium. Communist China's recent restrictions on global exports show how it can use that leverage to dominate the world and what leverage that creates for it.
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