‘Code and Country’ offers more ways for US to prevent Beijing’s AI dominance

Dr. J. Michael Waller, the Center’s Senior Analyst for Strategy, authored “Code and Country: Securing America’s AI lead before China locks down the future,” on the race to dominate AI. Building on the Trump Administration’s historic “AI Action Plan” released in July, Dr. Waller describes the stakes and adds recommendations to augment the comprehensive White House AI turnaround.

The Center’s report focuses not on the dangers of AI technology itself, but the dangers of that technology being dominated by the wrong hands: The People’s Republic of China.

The CCP depends on AI dominance to maintain political control of China, and to make itself the world’s sole superpower. While the CCP pressed ahead with AI dominance, the EU and the Biden Administration failed to keep pace, creating bureaucratic and legal roadblocks to their own AI advancement.

Chief among them in the US was the Biden Administration’s Executive Order 14110 of 2023 which imposed inhibitors to American AI development as if the US had no dangerous rival. The Trump administration took office seeing the danger, immediately rescinded the Biden measures, and opened the doors to keep the US dominant in AI.

“We are in one of the most dangerous periods in the history of human civilization,” Waller says.

“CCP dominance in AI will harm all of us. It would hold the US hostage to Beijing for crucial raw materials. It will strip away the Western civilizational guardrails intended to contain the dangers of the technology. It will allow the CCP influence in international AI standards and through that, permit the CCP to politicize AI to change how people and advanced machines perceive, think, and behave,” Waller says.

“This report lists a range of other dangers of CCP AI dominance, from surveillance and intelligence to social and psychological dominance. To say nothing of industrial, commercial, and military dominance.”

Waller explains how the US-Chinese AI race also encompasses the mining and refining of raw materials, chip development, trade policy, energy production, data center development, defense of intellectual property, and CCP-funded lawfare in US courts among other issues.

“By the CCP’s own official doctrine, statements, and actions, peaceful coexistence is not an option. The CCP, which developed the Great Firewall of China, is using AI as an Orwellian global Ministry of Truth at home and abroad. If dominant, it will turn the United States into a technological vassal. Fortunately for us, the CCP suffers from severe internal stresses that we can easily exploit to help the party of Mao Zedong collapse under its own weight. We have no choice but to do this before the CCP checkmates us in AI,” Waller concluded.