President Donald Trump may have claimed victory in his ongoing trade tantrum with China on Thursday, but look past the bravado and it’s clear that Chinese Premier Xi Jinping just played the president—again. Even worse, it looks like Trump just surrendered some of the United States’ most advanced technology to our largest adversary for a literal hill of beans.
Trump’s new Chinese trade deal would see the U.S. selling its most advanced Blackwell artificial intelligence chips to China in exchange for a Chinese commitment to resume the country’s purchases of American soybeans, which ground to a halt during the latest trade unrest. Cybersecurity experts and U.S. business leaders now warn that giving China easy access to AI technology will make it even harder for American companies to compete in global markets while making it easier for Chinese operatives to compromise national security.
“The defining fight of the 21st century will be who controls artificial intelligence,” Delaware Sen. Chris Coons told CNN. “It would be a tragic mistake for President Trump, in order to get some soybean orders out of China, to sell them these critical cutting-edge AI chips.”
Trump’s short-sighted soybean deal is just the most visible part of a trade deal that appears to benefit China on nearly every front. As The New York Times notes, Xi’s scheme to block American access to Chinese rare earth metals worked perfectly, bringing U.S. negotiators to the table without China actually needing to offer anything new. Xi’s team effectively offered Trump the chance to return to a deal the two nations already had in place, while American negotiators offered up a host of new concessions that will allow Xi to expand China’s growing tech dominance.