As President Xi Jinping prepares to land in the United States this week, national security experts are sounding the alarm that China is already eroding America’s AI advantage without firing a single shot. In a recent interview with Fox News Digital, Leah Siskind, an AI research fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, described a three‑part Chinese playbook: extracting the logic of American models, flooding the market with free open‑source alternatives, and ultimately weaponizing those systems for cognitive warfare.
China’s stealthy AI strategy
According to the experts, Chinese labs bypass billions of dollars in U.S. research by interrogating cutting‑edge American models and copying their capabilities. The process, known as “knowledge distillation,” allows a smaller Chinese model to learn from a larger, more sophisticated U.S. system, effectively stealing the underlying logic.
“They are able to leapfrog the process by kind of stealing this information,” Siskind said, citing the Chinese model DeepSeek, which was released in 2025 and demonstrated performance comparable to top American systems at a fraction of the cost.
Free, open‑source models undercut U.S. developers
While leading American tech firms pour billions into proprietary, ultra‑expensive AI platforms, China has focused on distributing free, open‑source models worldwide. This strategy is already influencing Fortune 500 companies that choose the cheaper Chinese alternatives, often without fully understanding the potential for hidden backdoors or CCP censorship.
“How can you compete with something that’s free when American tech is very, very expensive?” Siskind asked. “We can’t be sure a Chinese open‑source model is truly clean; that’s by design.”
Economic parallels and hardware challenges
China expert Gordon Chang compared the AI push to the country’s earlier solar‑panel campaign, noting that once Chinese models dominate on cost and availability, they can crowd out American competitors. He also highlighted the stark hardware disparity: the United States operates over 5,400 data centers versus roughly 450 in China, giving America a commanding lead in computing power.
To work around this gap, Chinese labs are leveraging knowledge‑distillation to extract capabilities from U.S. frontier models, a tactic recently flagged in a Department of Homeland Security advisory as an “industrial‑scale knowledge distillation campaign.”
President Trump’s response
Addressing the United Nations General Assembly, President Trump reaffirmed Washington’s commitment to outpace China in AI, announcing that U.S. government documents will now refer to artificial intelligence as “superintelligence.” He declared, “The United States totally rejects any attempt to construct a globalist scheme to control the artificial intelligence being spoken of. Whoever wins superintelligence wins, and we’re leading now over China by a lot and everyone else. And we’re going to keep it that way.”
Trump’s remarks underscore the administration’s focus on protecting democratic values and national security by ensuring the most advanced AI systems are developed under a free‑society framework.
Policy recommendations
Experts urged the White House to tighten chip‑export loopholes, blacklist foreign labs that engage in deceptive distillation, and invest heavily in U.S. open‑source AI development. Siskind emphasized that “the most advanced systems must be developed under democracy and represent democratic values, as opposed to authoritarian values.”
By bolstering domestic AI research, safeguarding supply chains, and maintaining a robust data‑center infrastructure, the administration aims to preserve America’s strategic edge and prevent foreign influence from shaping critical national‑security decisions.
What this means for Americans
While the threat may sound high‑tech, its implications are concrete: from factory automation and commercial drones to supply‑chain logistics, AI‑enhanced systems could become embedded in everyday infrastructure. Ensuring those systems are free from covert Chinese control is essential to protecting jobs, privacy, and the nation’s democratic process.
As President Xi arrives in Washington, the Trump administration is poised to treat these non‑cinematic AI challenges with the same urgency it applies to traditional military threats, reinforcing America’s commitment to liberty, faith‑based values, and the traditional family’s role in a free society.
Original reporting: Fox News (HLL/CB) — read the source article.
