INDIA - 2025/06/14: In this photo illustration, an AMD logo is seen displayed on a smartphone with a Nvidia logo in the background. (Photo Illustration by Avishek Das/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images)

SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images

The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) must be thrilled. See last month’s release of DeepSeek’s latest AI. It runs on chips created by Huawei. You’re doing a heckuva job, U.S. political class…

From the opening paragraph, readers could be excused for believing what they’re about to read is long a lament about potential China market share lost by Nvidia and AMD not because they can’t more than compete, but because politicians with last names like Warren, Cotton, Banks, Coons, Biden, and Trump decided to substitute themselves for the marketplace. And it is a lament.

It’s frustrating to see the growth of U.S. corporations stunted by political naivete rooted in the backwards, anti-growth and anti-national security notion that trade is war. No trade is war’s antidote since it personifies mutually-created prosperity. Except there’s more.

Just stop and consider what happens to commercial progress when talented individuals work together. Beautiful music of the commercial kind ensues. In other words, the brilliance of AI minds in the U.S. and China begs for them to work together. A failure to isn’t just anti-growth and anti-national security, it’s wildly anti-progress.

Sadly, and in the estimation of those high up in the U.S. and China political hierarchy, Artificial Intelligence (AI) is a race between countries that must be won. Which is why the CCP’s presumed excitement about Huawei’s chip advances is as economically bankrupt as the U.S. political class’s failed attempts to stunt Chinese AI growth via export controls.

Still, there’s a silver lining within the rampant foolishness implied in governmental attempts to plan commerce. In their endless efforts to restrain the flow of U.S. genius to China, and China’s to the U.S., political types in Beijing and Washington, D.C. remind us of how hopelessly backwards looking their pursuit of trade-is-war export controlling is. See DeepSeek again.

Looking back to the Hangzhou-based AI research company’s market-shaking international rollout of its AI in 2025, we can catch a glimpse of just how fast the market is moving. Lest we forget, most notable about January 20, 2025 was that due to U.S. export controls, the DeepSeek that so surprised investors and technologists alike was not powered by top-of-the-line Nvidia chips. Which was telling, as is last month’s news about DeepSeek’s latest AI.

Long implied in export controls has been the conceit that politicians on both sides of the unfortunate U.S./China divide would have a faint clue about what’s technologically relevant to the future, and by extension what to keep the “U.S.” and “China” from exporting so that one country can remain ahead of the other. Lots of luck there. See investor surprise in January of 2025, and see last month.

If AI’s evolution routinely catches investors and arena-based technologists by surprise, contemplate the blind gaze of warring political types from the U.S. and China. That’s because as you read this, the AIs that interest politicians have already been commoditized. See DeepSeek.

In short, the export controls crafted by U.S. politicians imagined what was, not what will be. And they plainly failed when it came to limiting China’s AI rise in the highly limited way that politicians grasp it. But what’s the unseen for Nvidia and AMD? Prosperous as both are, where would each be today if they could work with any customer, anywhere, free of ankle-biting, backwards-looking politicians?

As in imagine where Nvidia and AMD would be today if – as the AI understood by Warren, Biden, Trump et al was being commoditized – they’d been wholly free to create the AI of the future without regard to country borders. To say that it would make DeepSeek’s creations seem quaint is the arguably crucial, missed-by-export-controls point.