The Atlantic이 중국의 의심스러운 AI 전략을 검토한다: 명확한 국내 수요 동인이나 국제 전개 경로가 없는 과도한 투자.
In late last year, President Trump announced that Washington would ease export controls on chips to China, allowing Nvidia to sell its H200 AI processor to approved Chinese firms. The decision alarmed lawmakers, who feared the administration was trading American security and its AI advantage for a commercial agreement with Chinese leader Xi Jinping. Concerns that Chinese companies would rapidly acquire these advanced chips were quickly quelled by Beijing’s own restriction on H200 purchases. While officials have since permitted limited use of the hardware, they have strictly controlled its distribution. Beijing strongly prefers that domestic firms rely on homegrown chips, even when they lag behind foreign alternatives.
To project global influence and shield its economy from external pressures, Chinese leadership has actively sought to decouple the nation’s technology sector from international networks. The goal is for Chinese companies to commercialize innovations developed domestically and manufactured through entirely Chinese supply chains. This strategy shows early signs of success, evidenced by the proliferation of Chinese electric vehicles across Europe and the rapid advancement of AI models from firms like DeepSeek and Z.ai, which have drawn sharp attention in Silicon Valley. Nevertheless, this growing technological isolation risks stifling domestic innovation by cutting off access to the world’s most advanced tools. In globally integrated fields like artificial intelligence, China’s defensive insularity could ultimately hinder its progress.
China’s ascent and dominance in numerous industries stem largely from its earlier embrace of foreign innovation. During the 1980s, as the country began modernizing its economy through global trade, its aging industrial base rapidly absorbed imported technologies. Strategic policymakers subsequently implemented a series of targeted measures to cultivate and safeguard emerging sectors, enabling China to achieve leadership in areas including telecommunications and high-speed rail.
The expansion of digital media altered Beijing’s approach to openness, prompting the construction of the Great Firewall to filter what the government deemed harmful ideas and information. International platforms such as Facebook, Google, and X were blocked, paving the way for domestic substitutes. Firms that complied with strict state censorship mandates, including search engine operator Baidu and WeChat parent Tencent, grew into industry giants, serving roughly 1.1 billion users with minimal competition. However, as late entrants to the internet era constrained by domestic information controls, these companies never matched the global reach of Meta and Alphabet. The notable exception, TikTok, developed by Chinese firm ByteDance, remains unavailable within China.
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Visitors to China quickly encounter the distinct features of this isolated digital ecosystem. Residents communicate via WeChat rather than WhatsApp or Signal, and share content on Weibo, RedNote, and Douyin instead of Instagram or TikTok.
Approximately a decade ago, as U.S.-China geopolitical tensions intensified, President Xi accelerated China’s technological pivot toward self-reliance. Recognizing that reliance on foreign technology posed a national security risk and was essential for sustained economic growth, his administration rapidly expanded domestic research, manufacturing, and semiconductor supply chain independence. The Chinese government has invested hundreds of billions of dollars to advance homegrown chips, electric vehicles, artificial intelligence, and other frontier sectors, aiming to compete with the most advanced Western industries.
In certain industries, Xi’s strategy is yielding results. China has established a nearly complete domestic supply chain for electric vehicles, encompassing both propulsion batteries and operating software. Yet no nation, regardless of its scale, can independently produce the highest-quality components across every category. Efforts to construct a fully indigenous semiconductor supply chain, partly driven by President Biden’s 2022 export restrictions on advanced American AI processors and fabrication equipment, have proven exceptionally difficult. Semiconductor manufacturing is inherently complex and deeply globalized, relying on networks spanning multiple countries. Recreating such a network domestically is “essentially impossible,” Scott Kennedy, a senior adviser at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and a specialist in China’s technology sector, noted. Attempting to do so is “cost-prohibitive and self-defeating.”
China will persist in developing its independent chip industry despite these challenges. However, this push for self-sufficiency carries significant opportunity costs. The nation is diverting vast resources to replicate technologies already available globally. Although the domestic semiconductor sector is advancing, it remains behind Western counterparts. Chinese AI developers must operate without access to top-tier processors, a handicap that will likely endure if Beijing continues mandating domestic alternatives. Cross-border technology exchange “is the way a lot of innovation happens,” particularly in semiconductors, Paul Triolo, a China technology specialist at the Albright Stonebridge Group, observed. With the emergence of “two bifurcated stacks” in China and the United States, “some of the innovation won’t happen,” he added.
Mirroring earlier internet platform operators, China’s artificial intelligence sector operates within a heavily regulated and insulated domestic market. Government directives require Chinese enterprises and consumers to utilize AI models developed by domestic firms such as DeepSeek, Alibaba, and Moonshot, rather than OpenAI’s ChatGPT or Anthropic’s Claude. Consequently, local users are excluded from leading global AI systems precisely as the technology reshapes economies and societies worldwide. In April, regulators issued an unprecedented order compelling Meta to unwind its $2 billion acquisition of Manus, a Singapore-headquartered AI company founded in China and recognized for generating in-depth analytical reports, citing national security concerns. The directive sent an unambiguous signal to domestic tech founders: collaboration with foreign entities is prohibited.
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Beijing is further constraining China’s technological trajectory through additional measures. Chinese AI models are gaining international traction, largely due to their predominantly open-source architecture, which allows global users to freely adopt and modify them. However, regulators, concerned that foreign competitors might leverage Chinese-developed expertise, are reportedly considering new limitations on overseas access to the nation’s most advanced AI systems—a move expected to dampen their global expansion and adoption.
Evidence that Chinese firms acknowledge their lag behind American competitors has emerged in allegations of “distillation”—the practice of harvesting superior U.S. models to train domestic systems. In a letter to two U.S. senators last month, reviewed by The Atlantic, Anthropic accused Alibaba, the Chinese e-commerce giant behind the Qwen model, of executing “the largest known distillation attack” against Claude. The company allegedly deployed approximately 25,000 fraudulent accounts to illicitly extract some of the system’s “most valuable capabilities.” (An Alibaba spokesperson declined to comment.) In response, Anthropic has fortified Claude’s security protocols and systematically identified unauthorized Chinese accounts, actions that further entrench China’s technological isolation and complicate Beijing’s attempts to close the gap with better-resourced American rivals.
It remains possible that China’s technology sector will continue diverging, eventually producing systems that operate independently yet remain functionally comparable to American equivalents. Triolo suggests the AI landscape could fracture into two distinct ecosystems, with China and the United States anchoring competing spheres characterized by minimal cross-border integration.
A more probable outcome, however, is that by constructing an impenetrable barrier around its domestic technology sector and restricting access to global advancements, China is consigning itself to a position of prolonged technological inferiority.