Big Tech always gets its way with this White House

IS THE White House's artificial intelligence policy America First or simply Silicon Valley First?

- By Dave Lee

After this week, I'm leaning sharply towards the latter.It's surely the only way to reconcile Washington's conflicting policy choices, where China is made a useful bogeyman until Big Tech is interested in selling Beijing its wares.

China was prominent this week in White House AI czar David Sacks' defense of the administration's "One Rulebook for AI," which aims to run roughshod over states' rights. The move is necessary to not "stymie innovation" and let China "race ahead," he argued. Never mind that it's also an effort to circumvent the democratic process via executive fiat, overriding the will of Congress and state legislators.

But the threat of Chinese competition didn't prevent the industry from lobbying successfully to remove a clause in a defense spending bill that would have required Nvidia to prioritize the hardware needs of its American customers over foreign sales. This opened the way, on Tuesday, for the US to lift restrictions on the export of Nvidia Corp.'s higherend AI chips to China.