Semiconductors: The Limits of Containment?
The conference returned repeatedly to America’s use of export controls—and whether they are working. The verdict was nuanced. Philip Wong, the Willard R. and Inez Kerr Bell Professor of Electrical Engineering at Stanford, argued that in the semiconductor space the strategy has plainly backfired. By cutting China’s firms off from American chip-making equipment and advanced logic chips, the controls created a large captive domestic market for China’s equipment suppliers who previously had no customers. “It basically enabled the indigenous supply chains to have a wonderful set of customers within China,” Wong said, “and so they were able to climb up the learning curve really quickly, much more quickly than before.” Other speakers suggested that may be a tolerable cost as long as export controls allow the US to reach certain frontier capabilities first—as has been the case with Anthropic’s Mythos model.

Wong pushed back on both alarmism and dismissiveness about China's broader technological rise. China, he argued, has genuine world-class talent and infrastructure across multiple sectors—a peer competitor, not a pretender. "If you are among the best athletes, sometimes you win, sometimes other people win. That happens all the time." To treat any given Chinese breakthrough as proof of American collapse, or to wave it away as a fluke, both miss the point: China is, in his words, "a bona fide good athlete."

Wong’s recommended alternative to export controls was direct: rather than trying to slow a competitor, the United States should focus on “how do we make ourselves run faster.” That sentiment echoed throughout the day, particularly after he noted that the National Science Board had recently been dismissed and that American R&D funding continues to be primarily focused on defense-oriented research. 

Biotech: From Follower to Leading Force
Physician-scientist Chenjian Li, a research fellow at the Hoover Institution, offered striking data on China’s advancement in biotech. In the active pharmaceutical ingredients that form the basis of medicines taken by hundreds of millions of Americans daily, China has achieved near-total global dominance—some categories are 100% Chinese-sourced. “Medicine, be it advanced experimental drugs, high-end prescriptions or just daily over-the-counter pills, are actually much more impactful than weapons of mass destruction,” Li said, “because they affect 80% of the United States and global population.”

At the cutting edge of drug discovery, the picture is more nuanced but equally notable. Chinese biotech startups are increasingly producing competitive "me-too, me-better" drugs that improve on existing treatments, and pushing into "first-in-class" drugs—the crown jewels of pharmaceutical innovation. Major multinational corporations (MNCs) are paying billions to acquire them. The fact that Pfizer, Merck, and Eli Lilly are spending at this scale, Li argued, says something important: “The MNCs buy those new therapeutic assets because they are solid and unique, and because the MNCs don’t think that they can be as fast and as good in those lines.”

Economist Ruixue Jia of UC San Diego connected this pharmaceutical surge to China’s education system, which has spent decades steering enormous numbers of students toward engineering and STEM fields, including biology and life sciences. The founder of one of last year’s biggest biotech deals—a $5.6 billion transaction—fit a pattern Jia’s research keeps finding: educated in China, PhD in Canada, postdoc in the United States, returned to China in 2008. “It’s not just a success story of Chinese education,” she noted. “It’s also a success story of North American education.”

Fragmentation and the AI Race
A central tension runs through the broader debate: what do the world’s two largest economies actually gain or lose from their escalating technological confrontation?

Tsinghua economist Hong Ma argued that, measured by its own goals, the American trade war has largely failed. US import dependence on Chinese value-added has remained roughly constant despite years of tariffs, as goods simply reroute through third countries. Beyond tariffs, he warned of a longer-term cost: fragmentation into two separate innovation ecosystems, neither large enough to fully benefit from the other. The US would lose access to the Chinese market, Chinese engineering feedback, and the scale that sustains rapid innovation. “On both sides,” he said, “this is not the optimal equilibrium.”

Panelists pointed to China’s open-weight AI models as evidence of a different kind of competition playing out below the frontier. China’s models from Alibaba, Moonshot AI, and others are being used across the globe—often simply because they are cheaper and good enough for most applications. In this way, big US labs may be ahead on raw benchmarks, but that advantage does not automatically translate into leading global adoption.

Impressive Achievements, Costly Failures
Another useful synthesis came from Scott Kennedy of the Center for Strategic and International Studies. Kennedy’s “bumpy success” framework holds that China’s innovation trajectory is clearly positive—it now ranks tenth globally on the Innovation Index, ahead of Japan in the Asia-Pacific—but deeply uneven across sectors. He described China as a “slow tech dragon”: vast misallocation of resources produces genuine breakthroughs alongside enormous waste, and that waste is a real drag on the broader economy. Commercial aviation was one such example—despite being a signature priority for China’s leadership and the single largest recipient of state investment, the result is, in Kennedy’s words, “an American plane with Chinese paint.” The lesson is not that China cannot innovate, but that state-directed industrial policy produces highly variable results.

That framework—impressive achievements, structural waste, uneven outcomes—runs as a quiet undercurrent through the broader debate. Structural challenges remain: a domestic market that cannot yet absorb the premium prices of cutting-edge drugs; an education system optimized for solving known problems rather than identifying unknown ones; and an economy in which the benefits of technological investment are not yet reaching ordinary households.

The picture that emerges resists easy predictions, but carries a clear message: the old frameworks—China as technological follower, export controls as sufficient means to maintain America’s remaining technological edge, global supply chains as something susceptible to political redirection—often no longer fit the evidence. The task now is building better ones.
 

Discover more from the 2026 SCCEI China Conference. 
 

This article originally appeared on the Stanford Law School website.

As artificial intelligence reshapes political campaigns, public administration, national security, public opinion, and democracy, a new volume co-edited by Stanford Law School professor Nathaniel Persily, JD ’98, offers a timely, wide-ranging analysis of what AI may mean for politics and for the field of political science.

The volume, Artificial Intelligence, Politics, and Political Science, will be published by Cambridge University Press later this year. However, given the fast-changing nature of the subject matter, the draft of the book has been made available today, in advance of publication, giving policymakers, scholars, journalists, and the broader public early access. The volume represents the report of the Presidential Task Force on AI, Politics, and Political Science of the American Political Science Association, co-chaired by Persily and New York University professor Joshua A. Tucker.

Persily, the James B. McClatchy Professor of Law at Stanford Law School and co-director of the Stanford Law AI Initiative, is a leading scholar on the regulation of technology and the law of democracy.

The volume brings together more than 50 political scientists and scholars, writing on topics that include democracy, elections, public opinion, race and gender, the labor market, national security, public-sector governance, political theory, research methods, and teaching.

“The topic of AI and politics is evolving so rapidly that we felt the need to release pre-prints of the chapters well before publication,” said Persily, who teaches Governing Artificial Intelligence: Law, Policy, and Institutions at Stanford Law. “We hope that this volume generates a society-wide conversation on the political implications of AI. Of equal importance, we hope the book captures the state of the discipline of political science as it grapples with new research opportunities and teaching challenges presented by this revolutionary technology.”

From Social Media to AI

This volume is a successor to Persily and Tucker’s earlier volume, Social Media and Democracy: The State of the Field and Prospects for Reform, published in 2020, also by Cambridge Press. This newest volume considers the intersection and interaction of social media and AI, but it goes well beyond the topics relating to the information ecosystem and democracy. The task force authors explore AI’s impact on all kinds of political phenomena, from national security to the labor market to public opinion.

“Our experience studying social media has helped prepare us to analyze the political implications of this newest technology,” Tucker said. “However, the impact of AI – both on society and on the profession of political science has the potential to be much more dramatic. Not only will political scientists be exploring the shifts in politics due to AI, but they will be increasingly using AI as a tool to analyze these political phenomena.”

The editors express both “anxiety and excitement” regarding the impact of AI on politics and political science. Cautioning that we are at an early stage in evaluating the implications of this technology for political actors and those who study them, the volume represents a clarion call for political scientists to join in the efforts to steer the technology toward socially productive ends. While the development of AI has long been considered primarily the purview of computer scientists, the volume makes the case that considerations of AI’s political implications deserve to be front and center as the technology advances. Moreover, with chapters on political science methodology and teaching, the volume also seeks to provide guidance on questions that professors of political science need to be asking – and answering – to deal with the AI revolution.

Stanford’s Role in AI, Law, and Democracy

For Stanford Law School, the project reflects a growing body of work at the intersection of artificial intelligence, governance, democracy, and law. Through the Stanford Law AI Initiative and related centers and programs, law school faculty and researchers are examining how AI is affecting courts, administrative agencies, legal practice, elections, civil rights, and democratic institutions.

Other Stanford University contributors to Artificial Intelligence, Politics, and Political Science include Linda Eggert, assistant professor of philosophy; Rob Reich, the McGregor-Girand Professor of Social Ethics of Science and Technology; and Jennifer Pan, the Sir Robert Ho Tung Professor of Chinese Studies and professor of communication. Eggert and Reich contributed to a chapter on AI and political theory, while Pan contributed to a chapter on AI and the online information ecosystem, including the production and persuasion effects of AI-generated political content.

Persily’s scholarship has long focused on the law of democracy, including voting rights, redistricting, campaign finance, political parties, and election administration. He is a co-author of The Law of Democracy, a leading election law casebook, and has served as a special master or court-appointed expert in redistricting cases in several states. His more recent work has examined the governance of technology and technology’s impact on democracy, including as co-editor, with Tucker, of Social Media and Democracy: The State of the Field and Prospects for Reform, and as co-editor, with Erik Brynjolfsson, Alex Pentland, and Condoleezza Rice, of The Digitalist Papers: Artificial Intelligence and Democracy in America.

Read "Artificial Intelligence, Politics, and Political Science."

About Stanford Law School

Stanford Law School is one of the world’s leading institutions for legal scholarship and education. Its alumni are among the most influential decision makers in law, politics, business, and high technology. Faculty members argue before the Supreme Court, testify before Congress, produce outstanding legal scholarship and empirical analysis, and contribute regularly to the nation’s press as legal and policy experts. Stanford Law School has established a model for legal education that provides rigorous interdisciplinary training, hands-on experience, global perspective and a focus on public service.

The event was moderated by FSI director Colin Kahl, and featured FSI scholars with a cross-section of expertise: Drew Endy, FSI senior fellow (by courtesy) and associate professor in bioengineering at Stanford’s School of Engineering; Andrew Grotto, a research scholar at FSI’s Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC) and director of the Program on Geopolitics, Technology, and Governance (GTG); Jeff Hancock, senior fellow and director of FSI’s Tech Impact and Policy Center; and Jennifer Pan, FSI senior fellow and the Sir Robert Ho Tung Professor of Chinese Studies.

The scholars discussed four key areas to consider when it comes to the benefits, risks, and political implications of emerging technologies.

The Resurgence of Biotechnology

Humans have a long history with biotechnology, from fermentation to stem cell research. Now, after the past few decades in which industries were reshaped by digital technology, we’re seeing a potential biotech resurgence, explained Drew Endy, in which synthetic DNA chemistry allows scientists to build new DNA without using pre-existing molecules.

“I’m hopelessly biased,” said Endy. “But it's impossible for me to overstate the significance of being able to manufacture DNA from scratch.”

If the technology continues on its current trajectory, it could allow for a more accessible, affordable way to make useful items like computer chips or better enzymes, but it also carries the risk of offering a bad actor an easier path toward the creation of harmful toxins or pathogens.

Reflecting on the contrast between biotechnology and artificial intelligence, Colin Kahl observed, “We're reaching this moment where we're increasingly turning living organisms into zeros and ones, and we're turning zeros and ones into living organisms.”

Screens and Mental Health

Amid concerns about the amount of time children and teens are spending on screens and its impact on mental health, Australia recently passed the Social Media Minimum Age Act, which forbids social media companies to allow those under 16 from accessing their platforms.

According to Jeff Hancock, whose Tech Impact and Policy Center has been working alongside the Australian government to assess the ban’s effect, approximately 35% of young Australians have stopped using social media. But they’re not suddenly playing cricket with their friends. Many are simply swapping it out for ChatGPT or some other screen-based platform.

In California, legislation on a social media ban is being considered, which could influence other states. Issues involving social media and AI as they relate to children is one of today’s rare bipartisan issues.  

Of course, large language models can be persuasive and dangerous for adults, too. Hancock believes we should be “very concerned” about how AI will shape our perceptions of life, especially given the tendency of users to spend more time on social media when the algorithm feeds them negative content, and the economic incentives for platforms to keep users engaged.

The U.S.-China Decathalon

When it comes to the so-called AI “race” between the United States and China, Andrew Grotto prefers to compare it to a decathlon, since “AI competition is a multi-dimensional contest,” he explained. At the moment, both countries are vying to be the first to unlock artificial general intelligence (AGI), namely AI that matches or exceeds human intellectual capabilities.

When it comes to the adoption of America’s AI stack, “China is not only a formidable competitor on price, but increasingly quality,” Grotto stated. The U.S. is banking on other countries to view its values as an advantage. However, he said, we’re at a divisive moment in American foreign policy where it’s not a given that other countries will be keen to align with the U.S..

There are key differences between the U.S. and China in how they approach AI. While U.S. companies with massive market caps such as Google, Microsoft, and Amazon are focused mostly on serving wealthy countries with large populations, China is more willing to strategically invest in regions that don’t meet such criteria, like the Global South. It remains to be seen how the U.S. will address this gap, and how much it will attempt to reign in private businesses.

China does not share U.S. concerns on privacy and security risks. According to Jennifer Pan, the Chinese view on generative AI is “overwhelmingly positive. It's about the possibilities of this new technology in improving people's lives and the economy,” she said. Pan notes that “the goal of the Chinese Communist Party is to survive in power,” and so their regulations revolve mostly around political control.

Pan does note that, with the spread of digital technologies, propaganda has become more challenging for the Chinese Communist Party, as they now must compete with independent voices such as influencers for attention.  

The Bioweapons Risk

At the UN General Assembly in 2025, President Donald Trump called upon all nations to “end the development of bioweapons once and for all.”

Endy adds that nation states should also agree to a duty to notify each other in the event of an outbreak that could contribute to a pandemic. The risk of AI contributing to biological risk should not be taken lightly. Computational methods could potentially be used by bad actors to design novel toxins and pathogens that are undetectable and for which we don't have medical countermeasures or vaccines.

“People who wanted to cause harm in the past would see how difficult it is to utilize biology and be put off and pick up an automatic weapon instead,” Endy said. “But now if something like Claude makes it easier for them to use biotechnology, they could misuse biology.”

But Endy’s bigger concern is nation state bioweapons. The rhetoric around AI could be destabilizing, leading to one country deciding that if another country has a bioweapons program, they should follow suit.

“This is the historical pattern that played out 100 years ago that led to the militarization of biology leading into World War II,” Endy noted. “Nothing good came of that.”

Ideally, suggested Kahl, biology and AI would be used together for positive purposes, to create new vaccines and identify patient zeros earlier. Such positive uses of technology could help uplift humanity and propel us toward a brighter future.

What to Expect Next

“The World Changing Technology in 2026” panel discussion was the second event in FSI’s new quarterly series examining the state of the world. (Read a summary of the first event here.) The next discussion will take place in November 2026 and will examine the national and geopolitical ramifications of the U.S. mid-term elections. To join FSI at upcoming events on the latest developments in international affairs, register for invitations on the institute’s website.

Mak, who is co-director of Stanford Frontier Technology Lab and an investor in national security startups at Brave Capital, explains the importance of fostering these kinds of connections and bringing students into the conversation.

“The future of national security depends on collaboration, and this seminar is our effort to help forge those connections,” she says. “It’s been exciting to watch it evolve—and continue to grow—into a platform that bridges communities that rarely share the same room: students, technologists, policymakers, investors, and public-sector innovators.”

In its early years, the series featured government leaders like former Secretary of Defense Bill Perry, founders of pioneering companies in satellite imagery and robotics, and leaders from organizations such as the Department of Energy’s ARPA-E. More recently, CEOs like Hidden Level's Jeff Cole, whose company develops stealth and radar technology, and Baiju Bhatt of Aetherflux, a space solar power venture, have joined the discussion series.

Strengthening this flow of expertise between government and innovation hubs like Silicon Valley is key to the future and success of both sectors, and the students of today will be the leaders and policymakers of tomorrow driving those ventures, observes Eric Volmar, the teaching lead at the Gordian Knot Center.

"In modern entrepreneurship, every founder needs to be thinking about the policy aspects of their technologies. In modern government, every leader needs to be thinking about how emerging technologies affect national priorities,” says Volmer. “Tech and policy are fusing together, and our whole purpose is to prepare students for this new era.”

By giving students the opportunity to hear the personal accounts of innovators who have paved the way in addressing national issues and societal challenges through entrepreneurship, the co-leaders of “Silicon Valley & The U.S. Government” hope to encourage students to do the same.

“Students are looking to be inspired—to be mission-driven. Service to the country is one of those missions. Hearing how others have answered the call is what these seminars are all about," says Steve Blank, a lecturer and founding member of the Gordian Knot Center.

“Silicon Valley & The U.S. Government” meets once per week each fall and spring quarter. It can be found in the Stanford Courses catalogue as CEE 252, and is cross-listed for students in the Ford Dorsey Master’s in International Policy program as INTLPOL 300V. Recent sessions of the course are posted online every two weeks.