{"id":11151,"date":"2026-04-21T22:09:08","date_gmt":"2026-04-21T22:09:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/11151\/"},"modified":"2026-04-21T22:09:08","modified_gmt":"2026-04-21T22:09:08","slug":"opinion-us-china-ai-race-must-strike-a-balance-between-security-and-openness","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/11151\/","title":{"rendered":"Opinion | US-China AI race must strike a balance between security and openness"},"content":{"rendered":"

The United States House Select Committee on China recently released a report on artificial intelligence. Titled \u201cBuy What It Can, Steal What It Must: China\u2019s Campaign to Acquire Frontier AI Capabilities\u201d, it captures a hardening view in Washington<\/a> that Beijing\u2019s artificial intelligence rise is closely tied to both market access and security concerns.<\/p>\n

Whether fully substantiated or not, such beliefs are increasingly shaping the policy lens through which technology competition between the two countries is understood in the US \u2013 less as a matter of innovation, and more as one of national security.<\/p>\n

Against this backdrop, recent controversy over model distillation<\/a> involving leading US firms \u2013 including OpenAI, Anthropic and Alphabet \u2013 has drawn a great deal of attention. The coordination among these companies, coming soon after Washington\u2019s push to build a \u201cfull-stack AI export\u201d system, suggests that what appears to be a technical dispute is in fact part of a broader shift in how AI is governed \u2013 and contested \u2013 globally.<\/p>\n

At first glance, the debate over model distillation concerns technical pathways and intellectual property boundaries. Distillation is a widely used machine learning technique that enables smaller models to approximate the performance of larger ones, reducing computational costs and accelerating adoption. Its legal status remains ambiguous, and even US firms have used similar methods among themselves.<\/p>\n

However, in today\u2019s geopolitical environment, the issue has been reframed. Some US policymakers and companies argue that distilled models could be misused for cyber operations, disinformation campaigns or even military applications. What was once a question of optimisation has been elevated to one of national security.<\/p>\n

This shift reflects a deeper transformation in AI governance in the US. Over the past few years, Washington has moved from a primary focus on AI safety \u2013 including ethical risks and algorithmic harms \u2013 towards a more security-driven paradigm centred on strategic competition and technological control<\/a>. Rhetoric around safety has not disappeared, but it is increasingly fused with national security considerations.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The United States House Select Committee on China recently released a report on artificial intelligence. Titled \u201cBuy What…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":11152,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[24,1483,53,25,387,9071,3254,132,9073,1896,157,9072,214,9070,2187],"class_list":{"0":"post-11151","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-ai","8":"tag-ai","9":"tag-alphabet","10":"tag-anthropic","11":"tag-artificial-intelligence","12":"tag-china","13":"tag-export-controls","14":"tag-global-south","15":"tag-google","16":"tag-model-distillation","17":"tag-national-security","18":"tag-openai","19":"tag-stanford-institute-for-human-centred-artificial-intelligence","20":"tag-united-states","21":"tag-united-states-house-select-committee-on-china","22":"tag-washington"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11151","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11151"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11151\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/11152"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11151"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11151"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11151"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}