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Carol Yang

Orange Wang

The US tech industry’s increasingly hawkish attitude towards China has caused alarm among some observers who warn it could cause greater mistrust between the two countries.
Silicon Valley has become much more politicised in recent years, with leading figures such as Elon Musk donating vast sums to political campaigns, including Donald Trump’s 2024 presidential bid.
The US government has placed technological competition at the centre of its rivalry with Beijing. Meanwhile, tech lobbyists are “systematically” incorporating the concept of the “China threat” into their lobbying, according to an article published last month by the Journal of Contemporary Asia-Pacific Studies, a publication overseen by the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences.
The article said corporate leaders were “selectively” presenting information to tap into Washington’s concerns about China and “maximise” the chances of favourable policy decisions.
“The instrumentalisation of China-related issues in government-business interactions will further reinforce US misperceptions about China and intensify strategic mutual suspicion between the two sides,” warned the authors, Tan Yannan, a PhD student in international relations at Renmin University, and Sun Chenghao, a senior fellow of the Centre for International Security and Strategy at Tsinghua University.
The researchers said an “emerging” generation of American tech leaders had used their Chinese competitors as a “strategic lever” to “proactively shape the policy agenda” in the United States.
They cited the example of OpenAI, saying the firm had won support from the both Trump and the administration of his predecessor, Joe Biden, for investing in AI infrastructure by repeatedly arguing that failing to do so would chip away at the country’s technological edge over China.
The paper contrasted this approach with that of “traditional” tech giants such as Meta, which the authors said was using China-related rhetoric in a “defensive” manner to divert attention while facing antitrust regulatory scrutiny at home.


This “structural” shift in lobbying was having a “profound” impact on both the China-US tech rivalry and global technology governance, Tan and Sun wrote.
“The increasingly instrumentalised, tactical and systematic use of China-related information in lobbying efforts will structurally accumulate cognitive risks at the federal and local levels in the US [ahead of the] midterm elections,” they warned.
Last week, Dario Amodei, the chief executive of Anthropic, the company behind the Claude large language model, warned that AI open-source models could be exploited by “authoritarian governments” such as Beijing.
He said they could be used for internal repression, to carry out cyber and biological attacks or gain other military advantages.
Amodei urged Washington to tighten export controls on advanced chips and crack down on what he described as “industrial-scale distillation operations” by Chinese companies to prevent them gaining an edge on their US competitors.
He was speaking after the Kimi K3 model released by Beijing-based start-up Moonshot AI last month – which is reported to be as powerful but much cheaper than its US competitors – had triggered a debate in both Silicon Valley and Washington over whether the US should ban American firms from using Chinese open-source models.
However, Amodei said his company “has never advocated for a ban” on these models, which are also known as open-weight models.
Meanwhile, OpenAI chief Sam Altman has said he wants the US “to win in AI both in open source and proprietary models” while the firm’s head of strategic futures Dean Ball recently wrote on social media that “one probable outcome of an open-weight model-dominant world is full AI communism, which is precisely what China proposes”.
He added that there should be regulatory constraints on the use of Chinese models, but said there was no need to ban open-source technology.
OpenAI also joined dozens of other tech companies, including US chip giant Nvidia, in signing an open letter supporting open-weight models.


But David Sacks, Trump’s former crypto and AI tsar, has accused Anthropic and OpenAI of “hypocrisy” for flagging Chinese open-source technology as a security threat, saying they were trying to prevent other American developers from using them to build their own models.
“I’m not defending Chinese companies. I’m defending American developers who need to be able to use everything in the public domain,” he said during a recent episode of the All-In podcast that he co-hosts.
Tan and Sun also warned that Silicon Valley firms were “using the narrative of ‘US-Europe artificial intelligence cooperation to counter China’ as a rhetorical lever to stoke tensions among China, the United States and Europe [and] adding institutional pressure to efforts to build multilateral dialogue over technology governance”.


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American tech giants are trying to tap into lawmakers concerns about China to secure favourable outcomes, some analysts have warned


American tech giants are trying to tap into lawmakers concerns about China to secure favourable outcomes, some analysts have warned.


Could Silicon Valley’s lobbying create ‘mutual suspicion’ between US and China?

.css-1c6uqr6{color:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-size:inherit;font-family:inherit;line-height:inherit;overflow-wrap:break-word;}American tech giants are trying to tap into lawmakers concerns about China to secure favourable outcomes, some analysts have warned

American tech giants are trying to tap into lawmakers concerns about China to secure favourable outcomes, some analysts have warned