In his now-classic 2018 book, AI Superpowers, Kai-Fu Lee threw down the gauntlet in arguing that China poses a growing technological threat to the United States. When Lee gave a guest lecture to my “Next China” class at Yale in late 2019, my students were enthralled by his provocative case: America was about to lose its first-mover advantage in discovery (the expertise of AI’s algorithms) to China’s advantage in implementation (big-data-driven applications).

Artificial intelligence may transform human society for the better by releasing people from repetitive work and improving the speed of innovation. But no one is immune from its potential negative social impacts and security threats. Some worry about becoming its victims.

Chinese chipmakers have remained surprisingly resilient despite U.S. semiconductor export controls. By redirecting focus towards legacy chip production, stockpiling restricted foreign chips, government support, and open-source RISC-V chip design architecture, China’s semiconductor industry may survive Washington’s export control campaign.

While the United States is focused on competition with China, when it comes to artificial intelligence cooperation is the better choice. In applications such as retail, finance, manufacturing, self-driving cars and telemedicine, the two countries can both win.

A ban on the export of advanced chip manufacturing equipment to China by the Netherlands and Japan, imposes sweeping restrictions. The ban aims to contain China’s semiconductor industry and further widen America’s tech lead. But it’s not going to work.

Technology is ground zero in the conflict between the United States and China. For the American hegemon, it is about the leading edge of geostrategic power and the means for sustained prosperity. For China, it holds the key to the indigenous innovation required of a rising power. The tech war now underway between the two superpowers could well be the defining struggle of the twenty-first century.

To me, an eternal optimist, the United States and China appear more and more likely to be on a collision course for war. Recent US regulatory actions amount to nothing less than an economic and technological declaration of war against China and its 1.4 billion people.

The U.S. House speaker made a bad situation worse, and China-U.S. relations are headed to a new low. Changes can be seen on multiple fronts, but perhaps most clearly in the military dynamics between the two countries and in the chip-making regime, which has become an important chess piece in the geopolitical game.

Washington wants to build a “small chip world” for itself that is decoupled from global supply chains. This is pure fantasy. The act can neither help the U.S. achieve a secure supply chain nor rejuvenate its domestic chip manufacturing sector. And it won’t slow China down either.

The U.S. secretary of state restated and reinforced the Biden administration’s approach, proposing an “invest, align, compete” strategy for success over China. The speech revealed significant clues about the features of America’s basic strategic game ahead.