Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said the United States cannot afford to fall behind China in artificial intelligence, warning that a Chinese lead would outweigh other U.S. advantages.
“Beating China—there is no day after tomorrow if China wins at this,” Bessent said on Sept. 9 at Breitbart News’s “State of the Economy” event in Washington. “If they were to pull ahead of us on AI, then nothing else matters.”
Bessent made the remarks while answering a question about opposition to data centers and the need to expand the infrastructure required for AI development.
On the same day, the National Security Agency, Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, and FBI issued a joint advisory accusing six China-based AI companies of conducting industrial-scale campaigns to extract capabilities from U.S. frontier AI models. …