US-China AI race must strike a balance between security and openness

The China" class="entity-link entity-organization" data-entity-id="120172" data-entity-type="organization">United States House Select Committee on China recently released a report on artificial intelligence. Titled “Buy What It Can, Steal What It Must: China’s Campaign to Acquire Frontier AI Capabilities”, it captures a hardening view in Washington that Beijing’s artificial intelligence rise is closely tied to both market access and security concerns.Whether fully substantiated or not, such beliefs are increasingly shaping the policy lens through which technology competition between the two countries is understood in the US – less as a matter of innovation, and more as one of national security.Against this backdrop, recent controversy over model distillation involving leading US firms – including OpenAI, Anthropic and Alphabet – has drawn a great deal of attention. The coordination among these companies, coming soon after Washington’s push to build a “full-stack AI export” system, suggests that what appears to be a technical dispute is in fact part of a broader shift in how AI is governed – and contested – globally.