August 10, 2025

Scrapping AI Export Controls Is Self-Defeating

By: Liza Tobin and Matt Pottinger

This article was originally published in The Wall Street Journal.

Aaron Ginn’s op-ed “China’s Z.ai and America’s Self-Defeating AI Strategy” (Aug. 6) mischaracterizes the purpose and effectiveness of export controls. The policy was never intended as a brick wall but as a strategic speed bump—one essential tool among many for maintaining America’s lead in artificial intelligence while limiting China’s military capabilities.

The controls on Nvidia’s H20 chips appear to have been working until CEO Jensen Huang’s lobbying secured a reversal that handed Beijing exactly what it wanted. DeepSeek’s founder admitted that the chip controls were his company’s biggest constraint. As AI’s compute demands soar, export controls allow America’s hardware advantage to deliver compounding benefits. Reversing course cedes those gains to China.

Beijing surely has two goals in mind: Signal to domestic companies that they ought to shun American technology as soon as possible, and manipulate Nvidia to reveal how it designs its chips so that Chinese GPU-makers can replace Nvidia even faster.

Mr. Ginn’s notion that “each Nvidia chip sent abroad is a new point on the board for American software and values” assumes vendor lock-in works in Leninist dictatorships as it does in free-market democracies. The Chinese regime isn’t a normal client—it’s a rival with a decades-old policy of replacing U.S. vendors with indigenous alternatives.

Beijing’s playbook should be obvious by now: It requires foreign vendors to surrender their trade secrets, then scales up domestic competitors and displaces foreign suppliers—first in China, then abroad. Xi Jinping was backing efforts to replace Nvidia long before Washington moved to restrict its chip exports. Our permissiveness gets him one step closer to that goal.

Read the full article in The Wall Street Journal.

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