Americans often hear about China’s having surpassed the United States in the manufacturing of emerging technologies, including clean energy, electric vehicles and drones. Semiconductors are an important exception. In partnership with its allies in Europe and Asia, America designs and makes by far the best computer chips in the world.
Those chips are crucial to America’s economy and national security. They have enabled the development of the world’s leading technology companies and allowed the military to create advanced weapons. With artificial intelligence, these chips have become even more important. They are the engines that power frontier A.I. models.
China is working hard to catch up, and the United States should take steps to keep its advantage. Most important, it should continue to prohibit American companies from selling the most advanced chips and equipment to China. Over the past decade, presidents of both parties have worked with Congress to enact export controls. Those controls have been “existentially important,” Dario Amodei, the chief executive of Anthropic, the A.I. company, has said.
In his second term, however, President Trump has gone the opposite direction. He has relaxed controls on some advanced semiconductors and suggested he may go further. Nvidia, an American company that makes the most advanced chips, has lobbied for the ability to sell more to China and is likely to continue pushing. Yet this is a classic case in which a company’s interest runs counter to the national interest.
The new A.I. model Mythos, from Anthropic, is a clear example of why it is so important for the United States to remain in the lead in the artificial intelligence race.
Mythos is so powerful that many experts believe that it presents a cybersecurity threat to governments, companies and individuals. Hackers could potentially use it to penetrate banks, hospitals, energy grids and communication networks. In response, Anthropic has released Mythos to some government agencies and a small number of companies, giving them a chance to understand their vulnerabilities and improve their defenses. Developers for the Firefox web browser said they were able to fix more security bugs in one month with the help of Mythos than they did in all of 2025.
Now imagine that a Chinese company had obtained a model like Mythos first. Over the past decade, hackers linked to China have broken into the computer systems of the U.S. government, Microsoft, a large health insurer and a major credit agency. A proxy group known as Volt Typhoon has attempted to install malware inside American water and electricity systems to give China the ability to disrupt them. Mythos could have expanded these efforts, which ultimately serve the authoritarian aims of the Chinese Communist Party.
The A.I. race between China and the United States has recently narrowed. On July 16, a Chinese start-up, Moonshot AI, released a model that matched Anthropic’s best publicly available model in some capabilities even though it remains behind overall. Tellingly, Michael Kratsios, the current White House science adviser, accused Moonshot of illicitly gaining access to Nvidia technology in Thailand as part of developing the new model.
China has two advantages in the semiconductor race: far more people, including scientists, than the United States; and abundant electricity for data centers, thanks to its rapid build-out of energy infrastructure. Chips are China’s main choke point. Its best semiconductors remain well behind Nvidia’s best publicly available line of chips, known as Blackwell, and also behind even Nvidia’s next most powerful line, the H200.
The gap reflects both America’s scientific capabilities and the success of federal policy. Mr. Trump deserves some credit for that success. In his first term, he imposed new export controls against China. President Joe Biden significantly strengthened the controls. Members of both parties in Congress backed the actions, and some House Republicans criticized Mr. Biden for being too soft.
China’s leaders and technology executives understand how effective the export controls have been. “Money has never been the problem for us,” said Liang Wenfeng, the chief executive of DeepSeek, one of China’s most advanced A.I. companies. “Bans on shipments of advanced chips are the problem.” Chinese Premier Li Qiang similarly acknowledged that “insufficient supply of computing power and chips” was slowing A.I. development.
Nvidia and other critics of the export controls make an unpersuasive counterargument. They claim that the policy encourages China to build its own semiconductor industry instead of remaining dependent on America’s chips. But China’s leaders obviously recognize the importance of developing their own industry. They lack not the motivation to do so, but the technical ability. Giving them the world’s most advanced chips, as they desire, would enhance their ability to develop their own version and beyond.
Some analogies expose the weakness of the counterargument. During the Cold War, Washington did not provide the Soviet Union with nuclear technology to prevent it from developing its own weapons. Nor does the United States today share other forms of the most advanced and sensitive technology, such as weapons systems, with China, even though doing so could increase the sales of the American companies that make the technology.
Fortunately, Mr. Trump’s softening of American policy has not yet had significant real-world effects. He has allowed China to buy H200 chips, Nvidia’s second-best line, but no sales have yet gone through. China seems to be holding out for access to the top line, and American officials would still need to approve each sale individually.
The best policy going forward would be a strengthening of the controls. Regulators should avoid approving any H200 requests unless they become confident that H200 would not strengthen China’s A.I. capabilities. The Trump administration should maintain the ban on Blackwell sales and should extend it to the next generation of chips, known as Rubin.
The administration should also fix loopholes that China has occasionally used to get around the controls. One example is the construction of data centers with advanced chips in countries that do not face export controls, such as Malaysia and Singapore. Working with Congress, the administration should increase budgets and staff at the Bureau of Industry and Security to closely track American-made chips.
And the Trump administration should stop its destructive approach to American alliances. This country’s semiconductor advantage depends on an intricate supply that involves Japan, the Netherlands, South Korea and Taiwan. Without these partners, the United States would lack the ability to turn innovative American designs into actual products.
At a time of national self-doubt, Americans can feel pride about our world-leading semiconductors. During the Cold War, the United States fell behind the Soviet Union in the space race and needed the 1957 launch of Sputnik to inspire a comeback. Another way to look at that story, however, is that the Soviets took their lead for granted and lost it.
This time, America has produced its own kind of Sputnik. We should not squander it.
