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Americans often hear about China's having surpassed the United States in the manufacturing of emerging technologies, including clean energy, electric vehicles and drones. Semiconductors are an important exception. In partnership with its allies in Europe and Asia, America designs and makes by far the best computer chips in the world.
Those chips are crucial to America's economy and national security. They have enabled the development of the world's leading technology companies and allowed the military to create advanced weapons. With artificial intelligence, these chips have become even more important. They are the engines that power frontier A.I. models.
China is working hard to catch up, and the United States should take steps to keep its advantage. Most important, it should continue to prohibit American companies from selling the most advanced chips and equipment to China. Over the past decade, presidents of both parties have worked with Congress to enact export controls. Those controls have been "existentially important," Dario Amodei, the chief executive of Anthropic, the A.I. company, has said.
In his second term, however, President Trump has gone the opposite direction. He has relaxed controls on some advanced semiconductors and suggested he may go further. Nvidia, an American company that makes the most advanced chips, has lobbied for the ability to sell more to China and is likely to continue pushing. Yet this is a classic case in which a company's interest runs counter to the national interest.
The new A.I. model Mythos, from Anthropic, is a clear example.
Mythos is so powerful that many experts believe that it presents a cybersecurity threat to governments, companies and individuals. Hackers could potentially use it to penetrate banks, hospitals, energy grids and communication networks. In response, Anthropic has released Mythos to some government agencies and a small number of companies, giving them a chance to understand their vulnerabilities and improve their defenses. Developers for the Firefox web browser said they were able to fix more security bugs in one month with the help of Mythos than they did in all of 2025.
Now imagine that a Chinese company had obtained a model like Mythos first. Over the past decade, hackers linked to China have broken into the computer systems of the U.S. government, Microsoft, a large health insurer and a major credit agency. A proxy group known as Volt Typhoon has attempted to install malware inside American water and electricity systems to give China the ability to disrupt them. Mythos could have expanded these efforts, which ultimately serve the authoritarian aims of the Chinese Communist Party.
The best policy going forward would be a strengthening regulatory controls and fix loopholes that China has occasionally used to get around the controls. One example is the construction of data centers with advanced chips in countries that do not face export controls, such as Malaysia and Singapore. Working with Congress, the administration should increase budgets and staff at the Bureau of Industry and Security to closely track American-made chips.
And the Trump administration should stop its destructive approach to American alliances. This country's semiconductor advantage depends on an intricate supply that involves Japan, the Netherlands, South Korea and Taiwan. Without these partners, the U.S. would lack the ability to turn innovative American designs into actual products.