House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Brian Mast warned that allowing American tech firms to chase business in China could make the US the ultimate “loser”, in remarks that followed US President Donald Trump’s return from Beijing, where artificial intelligence (AI) was discussed.
“There’s a reason that we don’t sell Lockheed F-35s [or] F-22s to China and beyond that, to Russia, Iran and North Korea,” Mast told a discussion in Washington on Tuesday, referring to the American fighter jets.
“The reason for that is not because we don’t want Lockheed to succeed ... It’s because we don’t want [those countries] militarily, or any other way, to be on par with the United States of America ... That’s why we don’t sell that technology to them. Because we want to be ahead.”
“I look at AI in the exact same way ... Just because we can help some companies win in the United States of America by winning in China doesn’t mean we help the United States of America win. And if anything, we may have forced the United States of America to be a loser in that circumstance,” he added.
Mast, speaking at a fireside chat organised by the Centre for a New American Security, was responding to a question on how the US should approach artificial intelligence talks with China.
Washington and Beijing agreed to hold further dialogue on AI following Trump’s visit to China last week, with the Chinese foreign ministry saying that the two countries, as “leading AI powers ... need to work together to promote the development of AI and improve its governance”.
US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent earlier told CNBC that the two countries were “going to start talking” about AI and “set up a protocol in terms of how do we go forward with practices for AI”. Trump has said the two sides could work together on “guardrails” on AI.
“That’s how I would advise the president. Every piece of compute, which is a chip ... that we sell to China, we are selling them a little Chinese hacker to go out there and distil our models or work against our Pentagon,” Mast said.
For years, the US has tried to slow China’s AI development by restricting sales of advanced semiconductors, particularly from Nvidia, to the country.
When Trump was in Beijing, Reuters reported that Washington cleared export licenses for Nvidia’s H200 chips to roughly 10 Chinese firms, including Alibaba Group Holding, Tencent Holdings and ByteDance.
Alibaba owns the South China Morning Post.
Mast stressed that US chips must not reach the “wrong places”, pointing to China’s military-civil fusion, a systematic integration of its commercial and defence industries.
“Tencent, Alibaba, ByteDance, Baidu, take your pick. The list goes on and on of those that you know certainly blend both of those worlds,” he said. “If they get the best chips, they win, and that is a real problem.”
The comments by Mast – known for his hawkish stance on China – reflect a rare consensus in Congress, where getting tough on Beijing has become an increasingly bipartisan position.
During the Tuesday discussion, Mast also firmly defended the controversial Match Act, which stands for Multilateral Alignment of Technology Controls on Hardware and was introduced in early April, which would require US allies such as Japan and the Netherlands to more closely align with US restrictions on the sale of advanced semiconductor equipment to China.
He did not say whether Beijing raised the issue during Chinese President Xi Jinping’s summit with Trump, but noted that European and Asian leaders had because “they want to be able to sell the most advanced equipment” to China.
“[It is] certainly one of the keystones to us staying ahead in this space. We want Huawei to struggle and have to scratch and claw for anything that they get [and] not give any of their companies ... an opportunity to steal,” he said.
“We don’t want them to have the opportunity to distil, to copy, to replicate, to do anything.” -- SOUTH CHINA MORNING POST
