Alan Estevez was profiled in an Inside U.S. Trade feature about the national security implications of the Trump administration’s relaxed export controls and how those changes could accelerate China’s artificial intelligence development.
Alan noted that permitting U.S. companies to export advanced chips to China will enable it “to further develop their artificial intelligence capabilities,” narrowing the gap with the United States — particularly because access to compute power remains one of China’s key constraints.
China would prefer to manufacture chips that provide access to advanced computing power, “but what the national security establishment is concerned with is the outcome of those chips,” Alan continued, “which is artificial intelligence capability that will be useful for military modernization.”Business advocates contend that selling chips to China is important for American innovation, Alan said. But companies can look to many non-Chinese markets for sales. “It’s a big world out there,” he said. “There are lots of places you can build data centers to develop
utting-edge artificial intelligence. Selling the American stack to the PRC just puts a foundation for the Chinese stack. And the reality is, the Chinese are not even close -- they’re a couple of generations behind cutting-edge. They’re impaired by the toolmaking controls that we put on their ability to scale or even produce cutting-edge.”
Alan does not expect the administration to make any significant changes to the U.S. export control regime in 2026 because of the Trump-Xi deal.
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