Hi—thanks for this comment. As someone working on export control policy, let me give you my perspective.
Firstly, an important precondition for a cooperative pause is leverage. You don’t get China to agree to a mutual pause by first giving away your main strategic advantage. You get them to agree by making the alternative to be “a race they’re losing”, which is worse than cooperation. Export controls are thus part of what creates the conditions for being able to pause. If you equalize compute access first, China has no reason to agree to a pause because they’d be in a great position to race.
This is basic negotiation theory. You don’t just disarm and hand over your weapons before the arms control treaty; you disarm as part of the treaty.
More critically, export controls are already priced in. The US has maintained semiconductor restrictions on China since October 2022, tightening them in 2023 and again in 2024, before loosening them late last year. The core diplomatic costs of these controls have already been paid. Easing controls now doesn’t recoup that trust. China won’t say “oh great, all is forgiven”. But easing controls does give away the strategic advantage those controls purchased.
I’d also dispute that placing chip export controls on a state makes them a “pariah state”. Restricting dual-use technology exports to strategic competitors is completely normal behavior among non-pariah states. Similarly to how we might restrict F-35 technology, nuclear technology, satellite components, rocket launch components, etc., to many countries.
Hi, thx for engaging, but I guess we’ll have to agree to disagree.
I do agree that chip controls would make a lot of sense as a source of leverage in negotiations over an AI pause in a world where China would be trying to build superintelligence and the US would be trying to force them to do a mutual pause. But we don’t live in that world. The Biden administration had no intention to agree to a cooperative pause when it imposed chip controls, and the Trump administration has somehow even less than no intention to pause; Trump seems to be going all-in on AI development.
You might object that controls are good because they are sort of increasing the supply of leverage which in the future could be used to do a pause, and that is true, BUT to do a deal, both leverage and trust are needed. And imho even without controls, the US has a lot of leverage over China just by the sheer power of its global hegemony.
So, leverage over China is already relatively abundant, so to speak, but Chinese trust is what is relatively scarce (as is, of course, American trust in Chinese intentions). So, I am skeptical that steps which build more leverage over China but decrease Chinese trust in American intentions get these countries closer to cooperation.
And I disagree that lifting controls doesn’t recoup Chinese trust. It does not recoup it fully, as if controls never happened, but I do think that it builds trust relative to a situation of continuing controls.
To use a somewhat strained example with which most are surely familiar, when Trump put up his Liberation Day tariffs, prices of various financial assets fell off a cliff, but when he partially reversed the tariffs, prices partially recouped. How come, if Trump has shown that he is untrustworthy and might change his mind any minute? Well, many investors are evidently betting he won’t do that, and so far they’ve been correct.
Imho it is a fairly general principle of human relationships that for maintaining trust: never doing a trust-damaging action > rescinding a trust-damaging action > continuing a trust-damaging action.
Also, Chinese-American relations are themselves a vivid example that trust can be rebuilt: in the 50s, they were at rock bottom due to various trust-destroying actions, notably in the Korean War, where the Chinese army attacked UN forces advancing toward the Yalu River and pushed them back from what is now unfortunately North Korea. But, skipping ahead, by 2000, after a lot of trust building, the US granted China Permanent Normal Trade Relations. Things went downhill after that, but that could change again.
I also disagree that chips used to train/run LLMs are in the same category as F-35s or nuclear material; imho they are more like steel or oil, commodities obviously important for military purposes but with extremely broad civilian applications, and actions like an oil embargo are considered to be hostile acts, usually only deployed against pariah states, unlike an “F-35 embargo.”
Finally, imho you misunderstood what point I was trying to make (ok, that’s on me, I should’ve been clearer) about pariah states – it is not that chip controls make China into a pariah state. They don’t. Rather, by deploying measures usually only used against pariah states, these controls blur differences between “normal” members of an international community and pariah states, thus devaluing the usefulness of not doing things that put the country on the naughty list, primarily for China but secondarily for everyone else.
Since a thing that puts countries on the naughty list is waging an aggressive war, I do think this development is bad.
Hi—thanks for this comment. As someone working on export control policy, let me give you my perspective.
Firstly, an important precondition for a cooperative pause is leverage. You don’t get China to agree to a mutual pause by first giving away your main strategic advantage. You get them to agree by making the alternative to be “a race they’re losing”, which is worse than cooperation. Export controls are thus part of what creates the conditions for being able to pause. If you equalize compute access first, China has no reason to agree to a pause because they’d be in a great position to race.
This is basic negotiation theory. You don’t just disarm and hand over your weapons before the arms control treaty; you disarm as part of the treaty.
More critically, export controls are already priced in. The US has maintained semiconductor restrictions on China since October 2022, tightening them in 2023 and again in 2024, before loosening them late last year. The core diplomatic costs of these controls have already been paid. Easing controls now doesn’t recoup that trust. China won’t say “oh great, all is forgiven”. But easing controls does give away the strategic advantage those controls purchased.
I’d also dispute that placing chip export controls on a state makes them a “pariah state”. Restricting dual-use technology exports to strategic competitors is completely normal behavior among non-pariah states. Similarly to how we might restrict F-35 technology, nuclear technology, satellite components, rocket launch components, etc., to many countries.
Hi, thx for engaging, but I guess we’ll have to agree to disagree.
I do agree that chip controls would make a lot of sense as a source of leverage in negotiations over an AI pause in a world where China would be trying to build superintelligence and the US would be trying to force them to do a mutual pause. But we don’t live in that world.
The Biden administration had no intention to agree to a cooperative pause when it imposed chip controls, and the Trump administration has somehow even less than no intention to pause; Trump seems to be going all-in on AI development.
You might object that controls are good because they are sort of increasing the supply of leverage which in the future could be used to do a pause, and that is true, BUT to do a deal, both leverage and trust are needed. And imho even without controls, the US has a lot of leverage over China just by the sheer power of its global hegemony.
So, leverage over China is already relatively abundant, so to speak, but Chinese trust is what is relatively scarce (as is, of course, American trust in Chinese intentions). So, I am skeptical that steps which build more leverage over China but decrease Chinese trust in American intentions get these countries closer to cooperation.
And I disagree that lifting controls doesn’t recoup Chinese trust. It does not recoup it fully, as if controls never happened, but I do think that it builds trust relative to a situation of continuing controls.
To use a somewhat strained example with which most are surely familiar, when Trump put up his Liberation Day tariffs, prices of various financial assets fell off a cliff, but when he partially reversed the tariffs, prices partially recouped. How come, if Trump has shown that he is untrustworthy and might change his mind any minute? Well, many investors are evidently betting he won’t do that, and so far they’ve been correct.
Imho it is a fairly general principle of human relationships that for maintaining trust: never doing a trust-damaging action > rescinding a trust-damaging action > continuing a trust-damaging action.
Also, Chinese-American relations are themselves a vivid example that trust can be rebuilt: in the 50s, they were at rock bottom due to various trust-destroying actions, notably in the Korean War, where the Chinese army attacked UN forces advancing toward the Yalu River and pushed them back from what is now unfortunately North Korea. But, skipping ahead, by 2000, after a lot of trust building, the US granted China Permanent Normal Trade Relations. Things went downhill after that, but that could change again.
I also disagree that chips used to train/run LLMs are in the same category as F-35s or nuclear material; imho they are more like steel or oil, commodities obviously important for military purposes but with extremely broad civilian applications, and actions like an oil embargo are considered to be hostile acts, usually only deployed against pariah states, unlike an “F-35 embargo.”
Finally, imho you misunderstood what point I was trying to make (ok, that’s on me, I should’ve been clearer) about pariah states – it is not that chip controls make China into a pariah state. They don’t. Rather, by deploying measures usually only used against pariah states, these controls blur differences between “normal” members of an international community and pariah states, thus devaluing the usefulness of not doing things that put the country on the naughty list, primarily for China but secondarily for everyone else.
Since a thing that puts countries on the naughty list is waging an aggressive war, I do think this development is bad.