Jim Lewis
May 15 is the deadline for comments on the Department of Commerce’s AI Diffusion Rule, issued by the Biden Administration at the last minute and the object of widespread criticism. The rule attempts to use export controls to create industrial policy on a global scale. However, it harms American leadership in AI, and the best thing would be to scrap it and start over.
The rule incentivizes China to accelerate its efforts to develop AI and chips, something it was already doing. The arrival of DeepSeek, China’s homegrown competitor to ChatGPT, caught the U.S. flat-footed. Claims that China “cheated” its way to success with DeepSeek miss the point. No one wins a race by standing on the brakes. Export controls that try to deny access to American technology worked forty years ago, but with the global diffusion of expertise and technology, they are far less effective now.
The essential question is whether it is better to have American or Chinese companies build the data centers and provide the AI hardware and services to meet global demand for new technology. The answer is not micromanaging overregulation, which requires American officials to decide how many chips a country should get. Let the market do that and use regulation to help American companies build revenue and market share, the new metrics for policy success.
No comments:
Post a Comment