Western tech supremacy requires openness, not restrictions

By
Pieter Cleppe
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Speaking at the World Economic Forum, Dario Amodei, the ceo of leading US artificial intelligence (AI) company Anthropic, strongly criticized the US decision to reverse an earlier ban on the sale of certain advanced semiconductors to China. He stated: “We are many years ahead of China in terms of our ability to make chips. (…) So I think it would be a big mistake to ship these chips”.

He thereby talked about the “incredible national security implications” of AI models that represent “essentially cognition, that are essentially intelligence”, likening future AI to a “country of geniuses in a data center,” saying to imagine “100 million people smarter than any Nobel Prize winner,” all under the control of one country or another.

“I think this is crazy,” Amodei said of the Trump administration’s decision, adding: “It’s a bit like selling nuclear weapons to North Korea and [bragging that] Boeing made the casings.”

The experience with these kinds of national security restrictions is however not exactly reassuring. In December 2025, it emerged that Chinese scientists had managed to build what the United States has spent years trying to prevent. In a high-security Shenzhen laboratory, they managed to create a prototype of a machine capable of producing the cutting-edge semiconductor chips that power artificial intelligence, smartphones and weapons central to Western military dominance, Reuters was able to find out.

A Reuters article explains the importance: “EUV machines sit at the heart of a technological Cold War. They use beams of extreme ultraviolet light to etch circuits thousands of times thinner than a human hair onto silicon wafers, currently a capability monopolized by the West. The smaller the circuits, the more powerful the chips.”

Telling is how in April 2025, ASML CEO Christophe Fouquet stated that China would need “many, many years” to develop such technology. That did not age well, to put it mildly.

Perhaps it is better to assume that China will be able to match Western technology. The answer, therefore is not to retreat, but to double down on competition, to maximize the opportunities for Western companies.

Nvidia’s experience as yet another argument in favour of openess

The Trump administration’s decision in December to relax H200 semiconductor sales restrictions to China – in exchange for a 25 percent fee for the US government – are a major win for Nvidia, which has argued that China will develop domestic alternatives if the ban would have remained in place. Nvidia’s experience serves as yet more evidence that openness serves the security interests of the West better than restrictions.

Nvidia’s ceo Jensen Huang last year slammed the 2022 policy of the U.S. Biden administration to restrict the export of Nvidia’s AI chips to China, which forced the company to design a processor that met the new limits. At the time, many industry experts were already skeptical, but Biden went ahead with it anyway.

In October 2025, Huang explained how the outcome of the policy ultimately damaged US interests, saying: “We went from 95% market share to 0%, and so I can’t imagine any policymaker thinking that that’s a good idea, that whatever policy we implemented caused America to lose one of the largest markets in the world”. He thereby noted that Nvidia is now “100% out of China.”

Noteworthy in this respect is that China has been imposing itself restrictions on the use of foreign chips producers. In August, publicly owned computing hubs across China were asked to source more than 50 per cent of their chips from domestic producers. Furthermore, three is also China’s progress in open-source models and applications. 

Huang does not argue against any security restrictions, but he mainly thinks that striking a balance between maintaining U.S. tech supremacy and keeping access to China will require nuance rather than an all-or-nothing approach.  

He thinks that the US export controls have not only hurt Nvidia, but the whole of the U.S., arguing that China will “move on” with or without Nvidia’s chips, and that Chinese AI researchers will turn to homegrown chips and technology from companies like Huawei, which has shifted from a telecommunications giant to a chips manufacturer as NVIDIA’s biggest competitor: “The U.S. has based its policy on the assumption that China cannot make AI chips,” Huang stresses, adding: “That assumption was always questionable, and now it’s clearly wrong.”

In that respect it is also interesting to listen to what Paul Triolo, partner and senior vice president for China at advisory firm DGA-Albright Stonebridge Group, has said about Huawei. According to him, “the export controls have ironically pushed Huawei into the arms of the Chinese government in a way that CEO Ren Zhengfei always resisted.” Just like economic sanctions tend to fail to rein in problematic regimes and even strengthen them, the same appears to be the case for tech restrictions.

In fact, according to Bloomberg, the Trump administration decision to relax US restrictions “was an assessment that Huawei can compete far more closely with Nvidia than the US has acknowledged. White House officials focused on a Huawei AI platform known as CloudMatrix 384 that relies on the company’s newer Ascend chips, the person said. Officials found that CloudMatrix 384 performed as well as a similar Nvidia system known as NVL72 that uses the US company’s most advanced Blackwell-design chips, according to the person, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive matters.

Adding a sense of urgency, the person said, was a conclusion by US officials that Huawei would be capable in 2026 of producing a few million of its Ascend 910C accelerators, a chip designed specifically to compete with Nvidia’s product line. That compares with a US estimate, given in June, that the Shenzhen-based company would be able to make just 200,000 of the Ascend line this year.”

Leverage to create the regulatory framework

To be clear: The Trump administration has not ended all security restrictions, now that Nvidia is allowed to export the H200 chip to Chinese customers, which is the most advanced US chip they are allowed to buy. Restrictions remain for the more advanced Blackwell generation of chips which Nvidia is selling in the US, while the company is reportedly preparing to shift to an even speedier family of chips named after the astronomer Vera Rubin. For the time being, all sales of these processors remain restricted on national security grounds.

Amodei’s arguments appeal to many. The Trump administration itself – not exactly known as friendly towards trade with China – has been flip-flopping on tech restrictions to China, until it opted to relax them, in the face of Nvidia’s experience.

Openness is key for companies to be able to continue to develop new technological progress. At the moment, American companies are in the lead, but this is by no means guaranteed to remain the case. If the free and democratic West would lose its technological edge, it will also lose the leverage to create the regulatory framework for new technology. Surely, leaving this to the Chinese Communist Party is not the best idea.

  

 

 

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