CIA Deputy Director Michael Ellis says that China represents an “existential threat” to the United States and that the agency’s top priority is outpacing the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in a high-stakes technological arms race that spans semiconductors, biotechnology, and artificial intelligence.
“China is the existential threat to American security in a way we really have never confronted before,” Ellis told Axios in an interview published on May 21, adding that a key CIA objective is to help U.S. companies maintain a “decisive technological advantage” to counter the CCP’s malign actions against the homeland.
In separate remarks, including an interview at the beginning of May with investor Anthony Pompliano, Ellis emphasized that President Donald Trump’s intelligence team is laser-focused on denying China any strategic edge, especially in advanced technologies that underpin both the economy and national defense. However, fields such as artificial intelligence and quantum computing are not areas that the U.S. intelligence community (IC) has traditionally been much involved in—and the CIA is looking to change that….