War or not, the Biden administration was carrying out a high bet that the United States could use its lever to retain China and that it was worth it for losses in terms of discounted US exports and collateral damage to bilateral bonds. On the one hand, it was a bet that was based on ideas established in Washington decades ago. US politicians had used technological restrictions to hinder the military modernization of China and punish the country for human rights violations with a cold war. The most recent progress in missiles and surveillance technology have strengthened that logical one. But several people who served in the Biden Administration say that even a newer concern was behind the big bet.
The key officials believed that the IA was approaching a flexion point – or different – that could give a nation important military and economic advantages. Some believed that a self-muffled system or the so-called general artificial intelligence could be just beyond the technical horizon. The risk that China could reach these thresholds was too big to be ignored.
This report of how the Biden administration has chosen to respond is based on interviews with more than 10 former US officials and politicians, some of whom have spoken on condition of anonymity to discuss the resolutions of the internal government.
Limp huawei
When the Biden administration introduced its transformative policy, it did not start from scratch. During his first mandate, President Donald Trump also targeted Chinese technology, including semiconductor companies, as part of a wider effort to curb the country’s technological increase and global influence.
In 2019, the Department of Commerce added The Chinese IT Giant Huawei to its list of entities, which actually interrupted it from the US supply chains, including chips, unless it has obtained a special license. The officials justified the measure with the accusations that Huawei had violated the US sanctions on Iran. But the experts believed that they were also trying to undermine the company more generally, fearing that Huawei exports of 5G wireless infrastructure all over the world could give Chinese spies and sabotitioners.
So the Trump administration doubled, this time, addressing a dark legal provision called “direct product rule produced abroad”. The FDPR was originally designed to make sure that the goods made through US innovation and technology – such as missiles or parts of the plane – do not combine with arms systems sold to opponents, even if those systems had been built abroad. In 2020, the Trump administration transformed this long -arm tool on Huawei, explicitly targeting the “company’s efforts to obtain advanced semiconductors developed or produced by the US software and technology”, as a secretary of the Wilbur Ross trade he said At the moment.
While the FDPR had previously been used to enforce multilateral weapons checks, the move against Huawei targeted “objects made with non -sensitive American technology, which were not on the control list, which had nothing to do with any Ai”, says Kevin Wolf, a former Obama’s export control of the Exports of Administration.
“Everyone thought it would be the end of this new extraterritorial control,” added Wolf. Instead, the United States government found the FDPR irresistible. Subsequently he would have transformed him into Russia after the 2022 invasion of Ukraine and in the end he will keep him to limit the high -power calculation in China. “Obviously we started using it as candies,” says Estevez. “Certainly threatening to use it, if not actually using it.”
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