Two years ago, the Biden administration fired the first shot in the great AI arms race of the twenty-first century. By announcing sweeping export controls on October 7th, 2022, the U.S. government leveraged American companies’ strength in semiconductors to block China’s access to the most high performance chips — those used in training and running advanced AI models.  The stated goal was to prevent U.S. chips from aiding China’s military modernization, but given the transformatio