“I think AGI will probably get developed during this president’s term,” OpenAI CEO Sam Altman
Bloomberg in January, meaning that technology powerful enough to carry out economically valuable work and make new scientific discoveries by itself would emerge in the next four years under U.S. President-elect Donald Trump. What’s more: China appeared to be catching up in the race to get there first.
For some U.S. officials, those realizations only underlined what they had been arguing for years: restricting China’s access to AI was now essential for U.S. national security. Whichever superpower achieves AGI first, the thinking goes, is likely to obtain a decisive strategic advantage, reap new scientific discoveries, wield powerful new weapons and surveillance technologies, and leave its competitor’s economy in the rear-view mirror.
“I think it is quite likely that the Trump Administration will find this policy appealing, and the reason is that we are in a critical moment in AI technology competition with China,” says Greg Allen, director of the Wadhwani Center for AI and Advanced Technologies at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), a Washington think tank. Contrary to rumors of AI’s progress reaching a plateau, OpenAI’s o3 model shows new capabilities are continuing to emerge rapidly, Allen says, leading many in Washington and Silicon Valley to bring forward their predictions of when they think AGI will arrive. And while Trump himself is unpredictable, many of the aides and policymakers set to occupy senior positions in his Administration are China hawks. “It matters a lot that the United States gets there before China,” says Allen, who supports the Biden Administration's new rules. “It is a pretty decisive move to make life much harder for China’s AI ecosystem.”
Allen agrees that they might push buyers toward China. But not fast enough, he says. It takes five to 10 years for a chipmaker to turn even huge investments into machines capable of making advanced new chips, and China simply doesn’t have that time, assuming AGI is on the horizon. “They are really stuck because they cannot get the advanced equipment that they need,” Allen says. “The alternative to American AI chips isn’t Chinese AI chips. It’s
no AI chips.”