Congress investigates threats from China’s DeepSeek to U.S. national security

Policymakers and lawmakers in Washington are brainstorming strategies to win the global AI competition. The Trump administration is developing an “AI Action Plan” intending to enhance America’s AI “dominance.”

R Street Institute senior fellow Adam Thierer told House lawmakers on Tuesday that traditional containment strategies would not help America win an “AI Cold War” against China.

“We’re not going to bottle up all Chinese AI advances with analog era trade restrictions and export controls,” Mr. Thierer said in written testimony. “Costly and poorly targeted industrial policy gimmicks won’t work either. We won’t beat China by copying China.”

Mr. Thierer said policymakers should look to the cooperative approach of congressional Republicans and the Clinton administration in the 1990s that sought to create “flexible governance” for online commerce and speech.

He recommended lawmakers adopt a checklist of items intended to spur freedom in the AI sector, such as embracing open source tools, ensuring diverse energy markets, recruiting top talent, balancing copyright and data privacy rules, and creating a national framework that trumps the “confusing patchwork of almost 1,000 state and local AI proposals pending today.”

“We must not allow fear-based policies to impede American AI development and diffusion, or else China wins,” he said.