AI race: How export restrictions may be giving US an advantage

AI race: How export restrictions may be giving US an advantage

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Thu, January 22, 2026 at 8:00 AM EST

In this video:

Anthropic (ANTH.PVT) CEO Dario Amodei likened permitting the sales of AI chips to China to "selling nuclear weapons to North Korea."

Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) senior fellow for China and emerging technologies, Chris McGuire, reacts to these comments and how the US leads China in hardware development amid a tightening AI race.

Also catch Chris McGuire's comments on the quality of China's AI progress compared to the US.

To watch more expert insights and analysis on the latest market action, check out more Market Domination.

Video Transcript

00:00

Speaker A

American chip companies, the Nvidias, the AMDs selling advanced AI chips to China, and whether that should be permitted. I don't know if you saw this, Anthropic CEO talking to Bloomberg. Uh, he said selling advanced AI chips to China, that was a mistake. Um, says, I think this is crazy, says it's a bit like selling nuclear weapons to North Korea. What do you make of those comments? Do you agree, Chris? Should we be in fact maintaining restrictions on these kind of AI chip exports?

00:36

Chris

Yeah, I did see those comments and I think it's a fair characterization. Look, I think that the the US restrictions on AI chip exports to China are the single biggest differentiator between the United States and China and AI. If you look at the rest of the AI stack, you know, data, talent, algorithms, uh electricity generation, applications, China is as good or better than us. But the fact is on on chips and AI compute and hardware, we have a massive lead. And given this is the single most important input into sophisticated AI models, and the need the compute needs of these models is radically increasing. This is both the core to our advantage and also the single biggest thing that the Chinese need to catch up. And there is significant bipartisan concern inside Washington on the plan of selling AI chip sales to China. And to see that, actually, you can look at the House Foreign Affairs Committee just today, which voted out a bipartisan bill 42 to 2 that would put significant restrictions on on AI chip sales to China, put congressional oversight on them in the same way that they oversee uh arms sales, and also ban the export of more advanced chips, Blackwell chips or the equivalents from other companies, uh for the next two years. So, we'll see where that legislation goes, but the fact is that is showing that I think while the administration is pursuing a policy of selling AI chips to China, I'm not sure that that is necessarily at a stable equilibrium right now, and there is real concern from both sides of the aisle that this might not be in the US national interest.

02:08

Speaker A

What about Chris and I'm I'm simplifying the argument. But you know the counter argument it goes something like this. Well, we should allow these AI chip sales to China because we want the Chinese consumer, Chinese enterprise. We want to get them loyal and locked in and committed to American tech. What do you think about that, Chris?

02:30

Chris

Yeah, so a couple of things I'd say in response. The first is that the Chinese government is never going to allow their companies to get addicted to US tech, right? They will make sure that every AI chip in China gets gets sold and they're going to prioritize semiconductor production. You can see this both in, you know, their their determination in indigenizing semiconductor uh production and uh just their historical reluctance to accepting US uh dominance or western reliance on the West for any strategic technology, particularly semiconductors. The other thing I'd say is that this idea that the that the chips are sticky and there's this addiction, I think doesn't really stand up to scrutiny. And the reason that you know that is you can actually look at all the AI labs and every single one of them is pursuing now uh, you know, training or running models on non-Nvidia chips. So what that shows is actually with a lot of capital and a lot of dedication, you actually can switch ecosystems. And the Chinese government, if nothing else, has a lot of capital and a lot of dedication and they'd be able to switch off as soon as they're able to indigenize as well.

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