Decoupling America's Artificial Intelligence Capabilities from China Act of 2025
Download PDFSponsored by
Sen. Hawley, Josh [R-MO]
ID: H001089
Bill's Journey to Becoming a Law
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đź“Ť Current Status
Next: The bill will be reviewed by relevant committees who will debate, amend, and vote on it.
Committee Review
Floor Action
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House Review
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2. Committee Review: The bill is sent to relevant committees for study, hearings, and revisions.
3. Floor Action: If approved by committee, the bill goes to the full chamber for debate and voting.
4. Other Chamber: If passed, the bill moves to the other chamber (House or Senate) for the same process.
5. Conference: If both chambers pass different versions, a conference committee reconciles the differences.
6. Presidential Action: The President can sign the bill into law, veto it, or take no action.
7. Became Law: If signed (or if Congress overrides a veto), the bill becomes law!
Bill Summary
Another brilliant example of legislative theater, courtesy of the esteemed Senator Hawley. Let's dissect this farce and expose the real motivations behind it.
**Main Purpose & Objectives:** The Decoupling America's Artificial Intelligence Capabilities from China Act of 2025 is a thinly veiled attempt to score political points by pretending to address the perceived threat of Chinese AI advancements. The bill's primary objective is to prohibit U.S. persons from advancing artificial intelligence capabilities within China, while also restricting imports and exports of related technology.
**Key Provisions & Changes to Existing Law:** The bill introduces a slew of definitions, including "artificial intelligence," "generative artificial intelligence," and "Chinese entity of concern." It then proceeds to prohibit the importation and exportation of AI-related technology or intellectual property developed in China. Penalties for non-compliance include criminal charges and fines.
**Affected Parties & Stakeholders:** The usual suspects are affected: tech companies, researchers, and anyone involved in the development or trade of AI-related technology. But let's be real, this bill is not about protecting national security or promoting American innovation; it's about grandstanding and appeasing the China-hawks in Congress.
**Potential Impact & Implications:** This bill will likely have a negligible impact on China's AI capabilities, as they will simply find alternative sources for technology and expertise. Meanwhile, U.S. companies and researchers will be forced to navigate a complex web of regulations, potentially stifling innovation and collaboration. The real winners here are the politicians who get to tout their "tough-on-China" credentials and the lobbyists who will profit from the ensuing bureaucratic chaos.
Diagnosis: This bill is suffering from a bad case of " Politician's Disease," characterized by symptoms such as:
* Grandstanding: Senator Hawley gets to pretend he's doing something meaningful about China, while actually accomplishing nothing. * Protectionism: The bill restricts trade and innovation under the guise of national security concerns. * Bureaucratic Overreach: The legislation creates a complex regulatory framework that will be exploited by special interests.
Treatment: A healthy dose of skepticism and critical thinking. We need to recognize this bill for what it is – a shallow attempt to score political points, rather than a genuine effort to address the complexities of AI development and trade.
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đź’° Campaign Finance Network
No campaign finance data available for Sen. Hawley, Josh [R-MO]
Project 2025 Policy Matches
This bill shows semantic similarity to the following sections of the Project 2025 policy document. Higher similarity scores indicate stronger thematic connections.
Introduction
— 221 — Intelligence Community influence and the FBI’s warnings about continued efforts through the 2022 mid- terms highlight the folly of undue certainty without consideration of alternatives. On election influence and other controversial issues, such as the origin of COVID-19, analysts at the most powerful intelligence agencies have increasingly tended to use the leeway they have been given to insert their political views into their work in order to influence (if possibly even control) the analytic process. They do this in ways that attempt to squash dissent and impair the creation of a culture in which entrenched views are challenged and unpopular analytical lines can sur- vive or not according to their merits. To help the United States and its leaders to outcompete China across mul- tifaceted societal, economic, military, and technological threats, the IC’s capability to conduct strategic intelligence analysis that is relevant to policymak- ers in both parties must be rebuilt and strengthened. Because Beijing may be a peer or even exceed U.S. capabilities in some areas, the post-9/11 analytic focus on quick-turnaround secrets is not good enough. Strategic planning—informed by intelligence—must take place for the United States to stay ahead of whatever new threats China may pose. An incoming conservative President will have the opportunity to signal the demand for such strategic products and prioritize their production through communications to intelligence leaders and formal mechanisms such as shifting priorities within the National Intelligence Priority Framework and structuring the President’s Daily Brief. The incoming DNI should also emphasize implementing the recommendations in the Ombudsman’s report, especially regarding objectiv- ity, the inclusion of dissenting viewpoints, and more serious efforts to hold senior leaders accountable for backchannel attempts to change or suppress analytic views. Accounting for the long history of intelligence failures and surprises, an incom- ing conservative President must appreciate the ambiguity, complexity, limits, and assumptions inherent in intelligence assessments. Intelligence often deals with the human dimension in complex decision systems within a foreign country or organi- zation, and this makes consistently accurate predictions difficult if not impossible to develop. Seeing something and understanding what you are seeing are two dif- ferent things, so a President should consistently and patiently press the IC about its potential biases, assumptions, methodology, and sourcing. With regard to election-threat analysis and politically controversial topics, agency leaders should take seriously the Ombudsman’s admonition that we need to maintain tradecraft standards across all countries and topics by ensuring that equitable standards apply across all foreign threat actors. Analysis should be put forward without regard to the domestic political ramifications of intelligence conclusions. “Obligation to Share” and Real-Time Auditing Capability. The fed- eral government has made admirable progress in recent years by being more — 222 — Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise forward-leaning in sharing cyber threat intelligence with private-sector partners and the public, emphasizing that the protective nature of such information is of value only if put into the right hands at the right time. Since critical infrastructure and services are overwhelmingly owned, managed, and defended by the private sector in the United States, there has been an increasing emphasis on declassify- ing intelligence and sharing actionable information with private-sector partners, often through industry-specific Information Sharing and Analysis Centers (ISACs); regional meetings of government and private-sector experts called InfraGard, run by the FBI; direct public notification from the Department of Homeland Security, the FBI, and (increasingly) the NSA; and more discreet one-on-one engagements led by the collecting agencies. These programs properly recognize the private sector’s role in providing cyber- security for Americans; in practice, however, the intelligence shared by the U.S. government through these venues is too often already known or no longer relevant by the time it makes its way through the downgrade process for sharing. In addition, government-shared information often needs to take advantage of the opportunity to provide contexts, such as attribution, trends, and size of the observed cyber problem. As warranted, additional context should be provided to the private sector as a matter of routine. To continue improving the U.S. government’s ability to defend the country’s most vital networks, the IC must adopt an “obligation to share” policy process, including the capacity for “write to release” intelligence products whereby newly discovered technical indicators, targeting, and other intelligence relevant to cyber defense are automatically provided either to the public or to targeted entities within 48 hours of their collection—which is how counterterrorism intel- ligence has been managed for years when it comes to a “duty to warn.” Under this policy, agency heads should still have the flexibility to withhold intelligence for operational or counterintelligence reasons but would need to report regularly to Congress on the number of and justification for exceptions. This policy would make sharing intelligence and defending networks the default, as it already is in the rest of the cybersecurity community outside the IC, to improve the quantity, relevance, and timeliness of defensive information while ensuring accountability for top leaders when they must withhold this information. One of the most significant challenges within the IC is presented by the need to share information promptly among the 18 elements of the intelligence enterprise. The only long-term solution to the understandable tension between the need to share information and the need to protect intelligence sources and methods is a robust real-time auditing capability that electronically flags unauthorized access. Under an identity management system with real-time audit, even the most sensi- tive information acquired by America’s intelligence agencies can be shared, and the access to and use of that information are appropriately monitored. Establishing
Introduction
— 221 — Intelligence Community influence and the FBI’s warnings about continued efforts through the 2022 mid- terms highlight the folly of undue certainty without consideration of alternatives. On election influence and other controversial issues, such as the origin of COVID-19, analysts at the most powerful intelligence agencies have increasingly tended to use the leeway they have been given to insert their political views into their work in order to influence (if possibly even control) the analytic process. They do this in ways that attempt to squash dissent and impair the creation of a culture in which entrenched views are challenged and unpopular analytical lines can sur- vive or not according to their merits. To help the United States and its leaders to outcompete China across mul- tifaceted societal, economic, military, and technological threats, the IC’s capability to conduct strategic intelligence analysis that is relevant to policymak- ers in both parties must be rebuilt and strengthened. Because Beijing may be a peer or even exceed U.S. capabilities in some areas, the post-9/11 analytic focus on quick-turnaround secrets is not good enough. Strategic planning—informed by intelligence—must take place for the United States to stay ahead of whatever new threats China may pose. An incoming conservative President will have the opportunity to signal the demand for such strategic products and prioritize their production through communications to intelligence leaders and formal mechanisms such as shifting priorities within the National Intelligence Priority Framework and structuring the President’s Daily Brief. The incoming DNI should also emphasize implementing the recommendations in the Ombudsman’s report, especially regarding objectiv- ity, the inclusion of dissenting viewpoints, and more serious efforts to hold senior leaders accountable for backchannel attempts to change or suppress analytic views. Accounting for the long history of intelligence failures and surprises, an incom- ing conservative President must appreciate the ambiguity, complexity, limits, and assumptions inherent in intelligence assessments. Intelligence often deals with the human dimension in complex decision systems within a foreign country or organi- zation, and this makes consistently accurate predictions difficult if not impossible to develop. Seeing something and understanding what you are seeing are two dif- ferent things, so a President should consistently and patiently press the IC about its potential biases, assumptions, methodology, and sourcing. With regard to election-threat analysis and politically controversial topics, agency leaders should take seriously the Ombudsman’s admonition that we need to maintain tradecraft standards across all countries and topics by ensuring that equitable standards apply across all foreign threat actors. Analysis should be put forward without regard to the domestic political ramifications of intelligence conclusions. “Obligation to Share” and Real-Time Auditing Capability. The fed- eral government has made admirable progress in recent years by being more
Introduction
— 786 — Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise example, Huawei, well-known within the American intelligence community as an instrument of Chinese military espionage, has partnered with the University of California–Berkeley on research that focuses on artificial intelligence and related areas such as deep learning, reinforcement learning, machine learning, natural language processing, and computer vision, all of which have important future mil- itary applications.28 In this way, UC–Berkeley, whether unwittingly or wittingly, helps to boost Communist China’s capabilities and quest for military dominance. Communist Chinese state actors are also strategically building research cen- ters in innovation centers and hubs like Silicon Valley and Boston. Such American research has accelerated Communist China’s development of hypersonic glide vehicles, which travel at speeds in excess of Mach 5 and are aimed at evading modern ballistic missile defense systems while they deliver their nuclear weapons. Technology-Seeking, State-Financed Foreign Direct Investment (FDI). If American entrepreneurs build it, Communist Chinese investors will come. And come they have in droves. In the words of the United States Trade Representative: The Chinese government directs and unfairly facilitates the systematic investment in, and acquisition of, U.S. companies and assets by Chinese companies, to obtain cutting-edge technologies and intellectual property and generate large-scale technology transfer in industries deemed important by state industrial plans.29 Communist Chinese buyers have included most prominently state-owned enterprises, private Chinese companies with interlocking ties to the Commu- nist Chinese state, and state-backed sovereign wealth funds. These agents of the Communist Chinese government push their foreign direct investment through vehicles that include mergers and acquisitions, seed and venture capital financing, and greenfield investing, particularly in strategically targeted high-technology industries. Since 2012, CB Insights has catalogued more than 600 high-technology investments in the United States worth close to $20 billion—with artificial intelli- gence, augmented and virtual reality, and robotics receiving a particular focus—by Communist China–based investors.30 All of these behaviors raise the question of whether Communist Chinese nation- als should be granted visas to penetrate our universities, think tanks, and research institutions and whether Communist Chinese capital should be allowed to invest in America’s cutting-edge technology firms. Policy Responses to Communist Chinese Aggression. It should be clear from this review that Communist China’s economic aggression is both widespread and systemic. The CCP’s self-proclaimed goal is to supplant the U.S. as the world’s dominant economic and military superpower. The question: How should the next American President address this aggression? Policy responses range from further
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About These Correlations
Policy matches are calculated using semantic similarity between bill summaries and Project 2025 policy text. A score of 60% or higher indicates meaningful thematic overlap. This does not imply direct causation or intent, but highlights areas where legislation aligns with Project 2025 policy objectives.