Inside the Biden Administration's Gamble to Freeze China’s AI Future

Alan Estevez was sitting at his dining room table wearing a T-shirt when Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimondo called on Zoom to ask if he wanted to be the Biden administration's top export control official. “You're going to have to sell me on this,” Estevez recalls telling her.

It was 2021, and the outspoken New Jersey native thought he had finally left public service behind. After more than three decades at the Pentagon, he had left and taken a job in consulting. He wasn't sure if he was ready to go back.

Could he be tempted by the opportunity to help oversee the tens of billions of dollars in semiconductor funding the administration was seeking from Congress? “I came from DOD,” he recalls saying. “$50 billion is OK money, but it's not a lot of money.” Then Raimondo appealed to his sense of service. Estevez gave in and took the job.

By the time Estevez was sworn in as under secretary of commerce for industry and security in the spring of 2022, he had his work cut out for him. The role he had accepted would turn out to be at the center of America's first serious effort to confront the geopolitical risks of artificial intelligence. Within a few years, the project would reshape relations between the world's two largest powers and alter the course of what may be one of the most consequential technologies in generations.

Shortly after he joined the Commerce Department, Estevez says, he began hearing from officials in the White House. Over breakfast one morning, Tarun Chhabra and Jason Matheny, two key figures working on technology and national security, told Estevez they were planning something big, and they would be needing his help.

Over the next six months, the US government revolutionized its strategy for competing with China, now widely considered the nation's most important technological rival. For years, US officials had sought to keep China one or two generations behind in semiconductors, the building blocks of modern technology that power everything from smartphones to AI. But now, as National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan declared that September, “we must maintain as large of a lead as possible.”

On October 7, 2022, the Biden administration announced a sweeping set of export controls designed to cut off China from the most advanced chips used for training powerful AI models, as well as specialized tools that China would need to upgrade its own lagging chipmaking industry. Officially, the controls were intended to throttle China's military modernization and stem human rights abuses fueled by surveillance technology. But as observers digested the dozens of pages of technical specifications and legalese, it became clear that the implications of the new policy were far more vast.

In practice, the United States was delivering a targeted blow that would ripple out across the Chinese economy, impacting research and development in every industry and scientific field that relied on computationally intensive machine learning. Anywhere cutting-edge AI or high-performance computing held promise—futuristic weapons, yes, but also curing disease and modeling climate change—the policy could undermine China. A New York Times writer called it a “declaration of economic war.”