Washington’s strategy to fight the threat of Chinese AI is still missing in action.

For all the noise, and all the money and national security interests riding on the outcome, Washington has not settled on a coherent plan. “We’re now in the worst of all worlds,” Adam Thierer of the R Street Institute told WP Intelligence. “Very arbitrary ad hoc governance of artificial intelligence; complete congressional dysfunctionalism leading to absolutely no statutory guidance; 1,800 state bills, many of which implicate frontier model regulation; and, meanwhile, we’ve got an open source threat from China.”