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The stakes are too high to look away

America Should Not Sell the Tools of Its Own Defeat

Advanced semiconductors are the single greatest bottleneck to powerful AI. Every chip we export to the Chinese Communist Party accelerates their pursuit of AI-enabled authoritarianism — and narrows the window we have to stay ahead.

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A narrow window is closing

The Chinese government has made no secret of its ambition to lead the world in artificial intelligence by 2030. AI is not just another technology — it is a force multiplier for surveillance, military capability, and social control at a scale no authoritarian regime has ever had access to.

Today, the United States holds a critical advantage: China remains several years behind in its ability to manufacture frontier-grade chips at scale. That gap is our margin of safety. But it only holds if we stop actively undermining it by selling advanced semiconductors and chip-making equipment to the very government racing to surpass us.

This is not a trade issue. It is a national security imperative.

The bottleneck is real
Advanced chips are the limiting factor for frontier AI development. Control the chips, and you control the pace of AI progress.
The lead is temporary
China is investing aggressively in domestic semiconductor capacity. Every chip we sell today shrinks a lead that took decades to build.
The applications are dangerous
AI-powered surveillance, autonomous weapons systems, and information warfare aren't hypothetical. They are active programs within the CCP's strategic framework.
The arguments for selling don't hold up
Claims that exporting our technology lets "America win" ignore what we're actually exporting: the capacity for an adversary to challenge us where it matters most.
We should absolutely not be selling chips, chip-making tools, or datacenters to the CCP. Chips and chip-making tools are the single greatest bottleneck to powerful AI, and blocking them is a simple but extremely effective measure, perhaps the most important single action we can take. It makes no sense to sell the CCP the tools with which to build an AI totalitarian state and possibly conquer us militarily.… In my view, this is like selling nuclear weapons to North Korea and then bragging that the missile casings are made by Boeing and so the US is "winning." China is several years behind the US in their ability to produce frontier chips in quantity, and the critical period for building the country of geniuses in a datacenter is very likely to be within those next several years. There is no reason to give a giant boost to their AI industry during this critical period. — Dario Amodei CEO of Anthropic, from "Machines of Loving Grace"

This issue needs attention, not apathy