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In 2022, Jake Sullivan, then national security adviser under President Joe Biden and a powerful figure in the White House’s foreign policy team, assembled an interagency planning exercise out of the Situation Room: What were all the possible circumstances and outcomes of an AI arms race between the US and China — from trade wars to real wars, possibly even the arrival of AGI — and how would the federal government respond?
The details and results of that simulation are classified, but on Sunday, I spoke to Sullivan and asked if he could at least describe one outcome: Did they ever run a scenario where the AI industry’s profit interests were driving foreign policy instead of the government?
His candid response surprised me. “I confess that we did not factor in the possibility that we would actually be rolling back our export controls.”
Sullivan, now a professor at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government, is definitively pro-artificial intelligence and pro-innovation. But he thinks about AI in a way that a former national security adviser would: as a means to gain a geopolitical advantage against adversaries like China. His decision at the time was to place tight controls on the high-end chips that American companies were allowed to sell to China, extending a policy that dates back to the Cold War: Don’t sell high-end tech to America’s foreign enemies. Despite extreme backlash from tech companies, Sullivan was confident his policies would remain in place once Biden left office, telling Bloomberg in a January 2025 interview that “by and large,” tech CEOs accepted the need for those export controls, and that he wasn’t worried about incoming President Donald Trump cutting deals with them to loosen trade restrictions.
But that is, of course, exactly what happened. Over the past year, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang slowly won over Trump, eventually persuading him to let Nvidia sell the H200 — its second-most powerful chip — to the Chinese market, with the US government taking a 25 percent cut. With America’s most advanced chips flooding into a market known for brazen IP theft, Sullivan is deeply alarmed that AI companies are literally delivering the United States’ technological advantage to a country that openly wants to surpass America. But even though the AI arms race is often compared to the nuclear arms race during the Cold War, there’s one crucial difference. The government funded nuclear research for the primary purpose of national defense, but tech companies are funding AI research for the primary purpose of making untold amounts of money. “Maybe that was a failure of imagination on my part,” admitted Sullivan.
Below, Sullivan and I have wide-ranging conversation about the current state of Trump’s AI policy, the lessons that Nvidia should take away from Tesla’s failures in the Chinese market, what he would have done if DeepSeek had been unveiled while he was still National Security Advisor, and — given that it was barely a day since the United States’ shocking abduction of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro — if the Trump administration would cite increased AI data center power consumption as a pretext for seizing Venezuela’s oil industry. (His assessment: “I would not put it past them.”)
This week at The Verge:
“[I]n the short term, they will be able to book more orders. In the long term, they are contributing to a competitor that is going to squeeze them over time.”
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
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