“There’s a great focus on China. We need to run faster. If we work with allies, we will be stronger,” Raimondo said at the conference, which was organised by the National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence (NSCAI). “The president is crystal clear and has directed us on his team to reach out to our allies.”

Chaired by the former Google chief executive Eric Schmidt, the NSCAI was established in 2018 as part of that year’s US National Defence Authorisation Act primarily to contend with risks policymakers and lawmakers saw in China’s technological advances.

US leads world on artificial intelligence but China is catching up: study

In a closing speech that included numerous mentions – explicit and oblique – of China, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken highlighted the high level of funding China was pouring into its ambition to become what he called “the world’s technology leader”.

It was increasingly difficult “to ensure that American innovations are used for commercial purposes only,” said Blinken, just days after the Biden administration added several Chinese companies to an export blacklist over alleged military ties. “Countries like China don’t differentiate between civilian and military in the same way [the US does]. And emerging technologies, including AI applications, blur that line too.”

In another apparent dig at China, he decried efforts by authoritarian regimes to use the internet as a tool to target activists and “squelch dissent”, pledging that the US would defend an “open, secure, reliable and interoperable internet”.

Summing up the thrust of the officials’ technology-related grievances with China, US National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan said the world faced a choice between “a democratic technological ecosystem” and “a vision of the future that says you have absolutely no privacy, no trust, no security; it’s simply big data owned by the government.”

China routinely rejects both criticism of its strict regulation of the internet and broader concerns about the national security risks posed by Chinese companies. Faced with such critiques, officials in Beijing often point to the 2013 National Security Agency (NSA) spying scandal exposed by Edward Snowden as evidence of double standards by Washington.

China’s embassy in Washington did not immediately respond to a request for comment about US officials’ comments on Tuesday portraying the country as a threat to the global digital ecosystem.

Addressing the military component of the administration’s full-court press on Tuesday, Defence Secretary Lloyd Austin said that China had laid down the AI gauntlet – making it clear it intends to be globally dominant by 2030 with a focus on surveillance, cyberattacks and autonomous weapons – but that the US was responding.

“We’re going to compete to win, but we’re going to do it the right way,” said Austin, adding that would entail incorporating ethics, democracy and open society into every AI system, an obvious dig at China’s authoritarian governance model.

To back up its commitment, he said, the Pentagon had requested $112 billion in its latest budget for science, testing, research and development and technological advances, with a significant part of that going to 600 AI-related “efforts” already under way.

US sanctions 23 more Chinese companies for suspected Xinjiang abuses, military and business ties

The remarks by Raimondo, Sullivan and Austin reflect a bipartisan view in Washington that the US must devote more resources to new technologies or else watch Beijing pass it by as the next global technology leader.

Sullivan used the NSCAI forum to call on US lawmakers to cooperate on getting a finished bill to Biden. The House is expected to vote on its version of the bill later this week.

The legislation, Sullivan said, was needed “to reverse the decades-long decline in federal R&D in science and technology”.

“If there‘s anything the first two waves of the digital revolution have taught us, it’s that long-term US leadership in technology is not assured,” he added.

“Large-scale efforts that harness the public, private and academic sectors can, however, measurably secure that leadership.”

Sullivan was referring to the initial free flow of information available online starting in the 1990s, followed by controls and censorship that authoritarian governments like China’s began to build into their internet ecosystems starting in the 2000s.

Raimondo’s Commerce Department has been at the forefront of Washington’s efforts to challenge China over its technological prowess.

02:06

Biden says G7 leaders agreed to call out China over human rights abuses in Xinjiang and Hong Kong

Biden says G7 leaders agreed to call out China over human rights abuses in Xinjiang and Hong Kong

The Chinese government’s alleged crimes include mass detentions of an estimated one million Uygurs in camps, coupled with a pervasive surveillance network that reportedly uses cutting-edge artificial intelligence to identify people by their faces, voices, gaits and ethnicity.

“Unfortunately we have seen the development of these technologies create surveillance states that would make Orwell blush,” said Senator Mark Warner, Democrat of Virginia and chair of the Senate intelligence committee, who spoke before Raimondo.

Numerous Chinese AI companies have been added to the Commerce Department’s “entity list” – essentially a trade blacklist that blocks certain Chinese companies from buying American equipment and supplies.

The list includes several AI companies, including Yitu, Megvii, SenseTime and iFlyTek.

On Friday, the Biden administration added another 23 Chinese entities to the blacklist, including multiple technology companies; on Sunday, China’s Ministry of Commerce called the move “an unreasonable suppression” of Chinese enterprises.

The NSCAI published a report this year urging Washington to compete head-on against China on artificial intelligence – but said that the US should do so without severing all collaborative research ties and commerce.

Additional reporting by Robert Delaney, Mark Magnier and Owen Churchill