As President Donald Trump prepares to welcome Chinese President Xi Jinping to the White House this month, a former Air Force officer who once sat in the cockpit of a B-1 bomber is urging the president to draw a hard line on the sale of advanced artificial intelligence chips to Beijing, arguing that America is on the verge of repeating a historic strategic mistake.
The author, who witnessed President Ronald Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev negotiate nuclear arms reductions in Reykjavik, Iceland, in 1986, draws a direct parallel between the nuclear arms race of the Cold War and the emerging technological arms race with China. The idea that American companies would have sold Moscow the technology to strengthen its nuclear arsenal during those negotiations would have been absurd, the author writes. Yet today, the United States is entertaining a remarkably similar proposition: selling China the advanced computer chips it needs to build the world's most powerful artificial intelligence.
Advanced AI chips are not nuclear weapons, the author acknowledges, but in the competition over artificial intelligence they may be the closest equivalent to the strategic materials that powered the last great arms race. Without enormous quantities of advanced chips and computing power, China cannot train frontier AI systems at the same scale or speed as the United States. That is precisely why Beijing wants them, and precisely why Washington should think very carefully before selling them.
The United States currently possesses enormous leverage. America remains at the center of the world's most advanced AI ecosystem, and China still depends heavily on access to American-designed chips and the broader technological infrastructure surrounding them. Earlier this year, the United States began allowing some advanced AI chips, including Nvidia's H200, to be sold to China on a case-by-case basis. Those sales come with restrictions and security requirements, but the author argues the strategic question is more fundamental: why should America accelerate China's ability to compete in the first place?
Supporters of chip sales argue that keeping China dependent on American technology preserves U.S. influence and supports American companies. They also contend it disincentivizes China from developing its own capabilities. But the author cites evidence that it has exactly the opposite effect. China is using American chips to accelerate its own capabilities, and national security should never be reduced to an argument over market share.
An advanced AI chip sold to China does not simply power a search engine or make a factory more efficient. At sufficient scale, these chips provide the computing power required to train increasingly capable AI systems with applications in intelligence, cyber operations, military planning, autonomous weapons, scientific research and countless other fields. The author notes that America would never have looked at Soviet demand for strategic nuclear technology and concluded that the important question was whether an American company could make the sale. Some technologies are too consequential to treat as ordinary commerce, and AI chips increasingly belong in that category.
This does not mean America should retreat from AI development. Quite the opposite, the author writes. The United States should build faster, innovate more aggressively and maintain as large a technological advantage over China as possible. But there is a difference between racing ahead and helping an adversary catch up.
Trump should use the Xi meeting to turn America's chip advantage into negotiating leverage. If China wants greater access to advanced American computing power, then Beijing should have to accept meaningful, verifiable limits on the most dangerous forms of AI development. The author calls for transparency around massive compute clusters and clear restrictions on capabilities that could threaten U.S. national security or escape meaningful human control. Any agreement must be enforceable, with a standard the author summarizes simply: trust nothing, verify everything.
This is where Reagan's example matters. He did not negotiate with the Soviet Union because America was weak. He rebuilt American strength first, then used that strength to secure limits on a dangerous arms race. He understood that you do not surrender your leverage before negotiations begin. Trump should apply that lesson to the defining technological competition of our time, the author argues. America should lead in AI, America should win, and America should negotiate from strength to keep this race from carrying both nations somewhere neither can control. But that cannot happen while Washington hands China the fuel it needs to catch up.