At a congressional hearing on Capitol Hill on Thursday, lawmakers and experts accused China of buying “what they can” and stealing “what they cannot” in the global artificial intelligence (AI) race, while warning the United States’ immigration and research policies could be hindering innovation necessary to stay ahead.

“The pattern is clear. China is dependent on our tech stack to continue their AI development. China is willing to buy what they can, and steal what they cannot, to advance their AI ambitions,” said John Moolenaar, House Select Committee on China chairman, in his opening statement.

The US and China remain in a highly competitive race for global AI leadership. While the US had an early lead with models like OpenAI’s ChatGPT, developments such as the emergence of models from Chinese firms like DeepSeek in 2025, and Beijing’s push to become a world leader in the sector by 2030, have begun to close the gap between the two superpowers.

Earlier this year, the US unveiled an AI export initiative aimed at securing America’s leadership and countering China’s influence.

“Chinese AI companies continue to rely on American chips,” Moolenaar alleged. “As the founder of Chinese AI champion DeepSeek has said, our problem has never been funding. It’s the embargo on high-end chips. So it should come as no surprise that Chinese AI firms are doing everything they can to legally and illegally acquire US chips to work around export controls.”

During the hearing, witnesses stressed the importance of compute – the processing power used to train and run AI models – in gaining a technological edge over China. Dmitri Alperovitch, chairman of the Washington-based think tank Silverado Policy Accelerator, called compute the “single most important input to winning”.