DeepSeek’s announcement that it will build artificial general intelligence doubled as a recruiting call in the AI race, and the United States should answer by keeping its allies on American AI rather than making American computing power harder to buy. I made that argument in The National Interest and on Politechly.
The company said it plans to double in size, and more than 10,000 résumés arrived within a day. DeepSeek, whose efficiency gains I wrote about in January 2025, was built with private money, but China’s 2017 National Intelligence Law compels every firm to cooperate with state intelligence work. In DeepSeek’s first outside raise, the state-backed National AI Industry Investment Fund was the only new investor to get voting rights, as I detailed in The National Interest. Beijing has also set public deadlines: world leadership in AI by 2030 and a fully AI-integrated economy by 2035.
Washington and American industry already have tools for building and selling American AI, starting with Stargate, which aims to put up to $500 billion of private capital behind American data centers. The Commerce Department’s American AI Exports Program, backed by Export-Import Bank financing, also helps allies buy American AI.
The risk to that strategy comes from Congress, where the House has passed the Remote Access Security Act. That bill would let the Commerce Department regulate and license remote access by any foreign person to controlled items such as advanced chips, authority broad enough to reach allied customers. Stopping China from renting American chips through the cloud is a sound goal, but allied buyers facing a hurdle that Chinese providers won’t impose will be tempted to buy Chinese instead.
Congress should hold the bill to the test every AI policy has to pass, whether it strengthens America’s position or China’s, and by that test lawmakers shouldn’t pass a version that makes American cloud services harder for allies to buy than Chinese ones.
The full piece is on Politechly: China Is Recruiting for the AI Race. America Must Respond.
This article was produced in part with AI, see my disclosure here.