The twenty-first century will be defined by the great power competition between the United States and China. The winner of that competition will likely be the nation that dominates the tech sector. During his first term, President Donald Trump defeated Communist China’s effort to control the global 5G market by installing Huawei as essentially the world’s sole telecommunications provider. 

Huawei did not take its loss lying down. The company took advantage of four years of Biden administration weakness to reconstitute as an Artificial Intelligence (AI) enterprise. Now, like it attempted to do with 5G, China seeks to make the rest of the world reliant on Huawei’s AI technology. As the great Yogi Berra once said, “It’s Déjà Vu all over again.”

President-elect Trump is about to take office again with a plan for an unprecedented era of American economic prosperity. But on its way out the door, the Biden administration is trying to hamstring Trump while giving Communist China a gift in the form of the Interim Final Rule on “Export Control Framework for AI Diffusion.” This proposed rule would create a global export control regime on AI and related hardware that has been on the market for years. This regime would restrict free commerce by preventing U.S. companies from freely selling mainstream AI hardware and software to American partners and allies abroad.

The consequence of the rule will be that Huawei fills the AI supplier void. China would thereby control the market for the most important technology of this century. Huawei would have the global monopoly it wanted for 5G in the more important AI sector.

The hardware and software that power AI and are targeted by Biden’s rule-making are at the heart of the transition in computing from a CPU-based model to a GPU-based model. This transition is designed to speed up the work of computers while reducing costs, such as those for energy. It is an area where we still lead China.

Instead of controlling “frontier AI,” the most advanced AI applications, the new Biden rules would allow frontier AI to be developed and sold unchecked by Chinese companies such as Huawei. American technology firms, with vastly diminished global markets, would be relegated to second-tier status. If U.S. companies are prevented by their government from meeting the demand for AI hardware and software, then Chinese companies will step in to meet this demand. There is little doubt that China will subsidize these firms and support their sales efforts diplomatically.

In addition to hobbling cutting-edge American technology companies, the new rule would exacerbate the worst elements of the outgoing administration’s Green New Deal and the so-called Inflation Reduction Act by allowing bureaucrats to pick winners and losers among U.S. companies. The next big breakthrough in tech will not be decided by the free market but rather by an unelected bureaucrat in Washington who claims to “know better” if Biden’s rule is allowed to stand.

In November, the American people decisively rejected an era of American weakness and chose President-elect Trump to reassert American economic might. The Biden administration is attempting a last-minute sabotage of President Trump’s second term by preventing American companies from leading and winning the race for AI and modern computing. This Biden endeavor must be rejected.

Robert C. O’Brien served as the twenty-seventh U.S. National Security Advisor under President Trump from 2019-2021.

Image: Shutterstock.com.