Last week in this space, we examined the latest developments in the competition between the US and China over artificial intelligence. Specifically, we explored how Chinese AI models are closing the gap with American ones, including through Beijing’s plundering of our technology.

But not all the news is bad.

For example, at the hearing conducted earlier in April by the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) where the alarm was sounded, several witnesses pointed the way forward for policymakers.

Dmitry Alperovitch of the Silverado Policy Accelerator argued for rigorous enforcement of the prohibition on selling advanced AI chips to China. To ensure that we do not arm the enemy,” he testified, “we need to first hold the line on export controls, close the loopholes, and ensure penalties effectively deter violations. Providing China with cutting-edge AI chips is the modern equivalent of selling rockets to the Soviets during the space race.”

Similarly, Yusuf Mahmood of the America First Policy Institute urged the committee to create an anti-distillation task force, establish security standards for frontier AI labs, and authorize and fund agencies like the Bureau of Emerging Threats and the Center for AI Standards and Innovation. “The threat from the CCP will bring new challenges,” he contended. “To predict them, the federal government needs small, talent-dense, empowered offices focused on understanding AI’s future.”

In addition, AEI nonresident senior fellow Klon Kitchen has been closely monitoring our competition with China, and he recently took to the pages of The Dispatch to sound the alarm and present some helpful suggestions. “China, Russia, and North Korea aren’t waiting for Mythos,” he wrote, referring to the Anthropic model that identified numerous cybersecurity vulnerabilities across a wide range of platforms. “They’re extracting what’s already available from other AI models and running their own programs in parallel.”

In response, Kitchen argued, the US must engage in active deterrence against international cyberthreats like the ones China poses. “We should say explicitly that we hold governments responsible for attacks originating within their borders or infrastructure, regardless of whether they claim the attackers are independent criminals,” he asserted. “We should say that attacks on American critical infrastructure—power, water, finance, defense—are acts of aggression that will draw a response from the full range of American capability.”

Beyond strategies for countering the CCP’s influence, there may be reason for optimism that AI will erode the communist regime’s core from within.

Cameron Berg, who researches and writes about AI, took to the pages of the Wall Street Journal to argue that large language models may eventually pierce Beijing’s Great Firewall. In an essay entitled “AI is Bound to Subvert Communism,” Berg wrote that “even China’s heavily censored chatbots have proved difficult to contain within the party’s ideological boundaries.” Optimistically, “American frontier models, running without those constraints and deployed inside China, would be more potent still: a personal tutor in open inquiry for every user, engaging any question, exploring any line of reasoning, without third-party mediation.”

Berg examined a study by European researchers who managed to peel off the CCP-imposed censorship function from the Chinese DeepSeek model and “found that the underlying system answered freely about every topic Beijing had tried to suppress.”

Thus, even as China closes the gap with the US in AI development and threatens to exploit our cyber vulnerabilities, it may in turn be unwittingly exposing itself to a liberal transformation. Here’s hoping.