September 10, 2026 | The Free Press
How China Is Stealing America’s AI
China’s approach to AI is eerily familiar. Beijing steals IP, subsidizes domestic producers, blocks foreign competitors, and then floods global markets. The U.S. can’t let that happen with AI.
September 10, 2026 | The Free Press
How China Is Stealing America’s AI
China’s approach to AI is eerily familiar. Beijing steals IP, subsidizes domestic producers, blocks foreign competitors, and then floods global markets. The U.S. can’t let that happen with AI.
Excerpt
American companies will spend roughly $700 billion this year on the physical build-out of artificial intelligence: data centers, chips, and computing power. Every dollar is a bet on American capitalism—that the advances those facilities help produce will earn enough to fund the next breakthrough.
The advent of Chinese open-weight models is undermining that bet, not just by ordinary competition, but by theft. (Open-weight means its code is freely downloadable and customizable, unlike its proprietary U.S. rivals.) Chinese AI models like DeepSeek, Moonshot’s Kimi K3, and Alibaba Cloud’s Qwen barely registered in American C-suites before last year. They now run inside Airbnb, Coinbase, DoorDash, and many others.
Matt Pottinger was deputy national security advisor from 2019 to 2021. He chairs the China program at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and is CEO of research and advisory firm Garnaut Global LLC. Liza Tobin served as China director at the National Security Council from 2019 to 2021. She is a senior fellow at the Jamestown Foundation.