The White House is intent on outcompeting China on technology. The ground on which this competition is taking place is chip making. But the Biden administration shouldn’t sit back and savor this accomplishment for one reason: What if its core belief — that advanced semiconductors are one of the critical fronts in the contest — is wrong?

Over the past six years, the U.S. government has relentlessly targeted China’s semiconductor industry. The Biden administration extended a Trump-era practice of placing Chinese tech companies on trade blacklists. The White House then declared supercomputing chips all but off limits to Chinese companies, saying that they advance China’s military modernization and human rights abuses. It diplomatically engaged with the Netherlands and Japan to jointly deny advanced chip-making equipment to China.

Then advanced artificial intelligence tools like ChatGPT, which require state-of-the-art chips, appeared on the scene. Now the White House is considering creating an investment screening mechanism that could block American investments in China’s semiconductor companies that could advance A.I. Most recently, the Biden administration is reportedly considering a further tightening of A.I. chip sales to China. Powerful chips are at the heart of A.I. development. And the U.S. government is vigilant about closing off China’s means of acquiring them

These efforts have certainly bruised some of China’s largest tech companies. China’s semiconductor prowess — shaky even at the best of times — is now dealing with major stresses as chip makers start to lose access to leading production tools. Most strikingly, more than half a year after Americans have begun to play with A.I. chatbots and image generation tools, Chinese consumers are still waiting for broadly available homegrown alternatives.

America’s actions are driven by the assumption, articulated by the national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, that computing chips are a force multiplier technology, staking it as critical to continued U.S. leadership. But what if the U.S. government is too focused on the most novel technologies rather than the most important ones? I believe America is in a great power contest with China, one that will be multidimensional and protracted, making it unlikely that success hinges solely on who can stay ahead in a few advanced technologies.

And while there’s no denying the potential significance of large language models, it remains far from obvious that America’s mastery of A.I. would really be a decisive advantage over China. In fact, it’s not even clear that Beijing views the present applications of A.I. as being of great importance. China’s leadership, which recently issued regulations demanding that A.I. chatbots must promote “socialist core values” and not challenge the doctrines of the ruling Communist Party, appears to be in no rush to allow this technology to proliferate among its people.

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