SAN FRANCISCO, CALIFORNIA – SEPTEMBER 04: Anthropic Co-founder and CEO Dario Amodei speaks at the “How AI Will Transform Business in the Next 18 Months” panel during INBOUND 2025 Powered by HubSpot at Moscone Center on September 04, 2025 in San Francisco, California. (Photo by Chance Yeh/Getty Images for HubSpot)
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In business, everyone’s spying on everyone else. Cars instruct. Manufacturers road test future models with camouflage, padding, and thick tape.
Of course, it’s all for naught once the car is released. Once on the market, it’s subsequently being taken apart by the competition.
Technology is no different. If anything, globalized efforts to figure out what the competition is doing are even more evident. And for obvious reasons. See the valuations placed on top technology corporations like Nvidia.
Sure enough, longtime Nvidia employee Dwight Diercks told The Thinking Machine (a history of Nvidia) author Stephen Witt that “Everyone takes a look at their competitors’ hardware and how it works.” Of course they do. And it’s happening right now.
Export controls or none, the competition is privy to what’s being produced stateside. While U.S. technology companies can control whom they sell their products to, and in ways that theoretically please invariably backward-looking politicians embracing export controls, there’s no controlling the final destination of any market good. If you’re producing in the “closed” economy that is the world economy, you’re trading with everyone, including with the competition.
This is worth remembering as Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei claims that China “cannot” overtake the U.S. in the artificial intelligence (AI) space without American chips. The view is already being disproven.
For evidence, see the CSI Information Technology Index which tracks technology companies in mainland China. The Index is up 53% over the past year largely thanks to big leaps in domestic AI models. Translated for U.S. readers, the export controls introduced by the Biden administration in October of 2022 have been an abject failure.
As opposed to them restraining AI advancement in China, they’ve instead driven feverish efforts within the Chinese technology sector to reduce foreign dependencies. And it’s not just with chips. See Huawei.
In 2023, and after endless attempts by the U.S. political class to suffocate it via – you guessed it – export controls, Huawei introduced the Mate Pro 60 smartphone. The consensus upon release was that while not quite the equivalent of an iPhone, it was close.
It’s evident the semiconductor chips are no different. If anything, the export controls unwisely foisted on U.S. producers like Nvidia, AMD and Intel have played into the hands of a Chinese Communist Party (CCP) intent on achieving “independence” from American technology giants. Huawei looms large yet again.
According to a Bloomberg report from June, the Shenzhen-based technology corporation is rapidly building its own chipmaking capabilities, including a 1.4 nm chip that was long thought physically impossible. As opposed to limiting China’s growth, the export controls have proven a Chinese self-sufficiency accelerant. See above. It’s precisely what the CCP wanted in the first place.
Say it repeatedly, export controls won’t work. And they’re a look backwards as is. It can’t be said enough that what’s seen as cutting edge today in technology rarely remains that way. See the Diercks quote from above. Everyone’s looking closely at what everyone else is doing.
Which means the only real way to stay on top in an industry as dynamic as semiconductor chips is to recognize that in commerce, the present is the past. Or, in the words of Jensen Huang himself, “if we don’t reinvent ourselves, and we don’t open the canvas for the things we can do,” we “will be commoditized out of business.”
Yes, precisely. Politicians are looking backwards. So is Amodei on the matter of China.