Jacob Helberg is senior policy advisor to the CEO of Palantir Technologies, and a commissioner on the US Commission for Economic and Security Issues. He is the author of The Wires of War: Technology and the Global Struggle for Power.
This transcript has been edited for length and clarity.
Federal Newswire: What was your view on the TikTok bill?
Helberg: The TikTok bill was a hugely precedent setting, historic piece of legislation. I've been a proponent of strategic technological decoupling. I think Bob Lighthizer and the Trump Administration started one of the biggest foreign policy recalibrations in a generation, identifying China as an adversary, deciding that we needed things like tariffs on steel to encourage the reshoring of manufacturing activities outside of China, and also double-clicking on Chinese software in the United States.
TikTok spent $27 million in lobbying. Despite all of that funding, part of what happened was policymakers from both sides had legitimate questions and concerns about national security–all traced back to the key question of, are you controlled by the Chinese Communist Party?
With all of that funding, TikTok never answered those questions, and not only do they always tap dance around that question, every former employee that worked at TikTok, every company leak, every statement under oath was an accumulation of contradictions and created a body of evidence over the last 18 months that pointed to a clear pattern of control by the CCP over TikTok.
Federal Newswire: What do you think are the takeaways from that situation in terms of US-China relations and technology?
Helberg: The TikTok bill fundamentally was a ratification of the basic belief that China has a civil-military fusion doctrine that it enforces, and we can't trust their technology. I think where this anchors the debate is, it helps prompt a holistic rethink of how we're going to continue treating Huawei moving forward, and how we're going to approach emerging companies like Temu and Shein in this country.
The US-China rivalry has entered a new phase and is in the throes of a technological arms race. Chinese AI is a major front in that arms race. The US and China are aggressively competing for dominance in that space, and there are third parties, like the UAE, that have committed to investing billions in large computing clusters and data centers.
We really need to think through the security of our supply chain. We don't want to wake up one day and be overly reliant on computing clusters in the UAE, the same way that we woke up in 2015 and all of our supply chains were in China. Thinking through what the best way would be for us to internationalize our AI technologies as a global platform, in order to have global dominance, while at the same time making sure that our supply chains in the AI industry, whether it's chips or large computing clusters, are safe and secure, and we have a domestic capacity to train our most advanced large language models is going to be critically important moving forward.
Federal Newswire: How do we excel and lead in space, AI, chips, and other technologies?
Helberg: If you look at America's strengths, we don't place a ceiling on success, which is a fundamental difference with China. If you look back at the early to mid 2010s, there was so much hubris on the part of the Chinese technology sector–they were the future, they work harder, they have more data, they're going to rule. Everyone remembers the book AI Superpowers, which, I would argue was a piece of Chinese propaganda because it predicted the demise of the American tech industry and the inevitable ascent of the Chinese tech industry.
Ultimately, people like Jack Ma and companies like Alibaba started to form an alternative power base inside of China. The Chinese government dropped the hammer.
We don't place a ceiling on success, which is great. Our entrepreneurs will go as far as the novelty of their ideas and their execution. We have some of the best innovators in the world, which is one of our strengths.
Our biggest weakness in my view is that we need to get a lot better at converting private innovations into hard power. First, we don't have civil-military fusion. We rely on a voluntary collaboration between the private sector and the public sector, and we need to get better at taking our private innovations and converting them into the most advanced military and geostrategic capabilities out there.
Second, our second weakness is manufacturing. China has accrued 25 years of an unparalleled manufacturing ecosystem. We spend more on our military than anyone in the world, and somehow we're short on everything. We're short on munitions. We're short on ships. There's a real problem there. It can't take $2 trillion and 25 years to build a plane. If you look at SpaceX, they brought the cost of a rocket launch down by 100x. We need to do that for defense. I think there's a lot of cross-pollination that could take place between our best innovators and the defense industrial base to actually change the economics of manufacturing in this country and bring about a manufacturing miracle.
Federal Newswire: What is your take on the issue of reciprocity in the relationship between the U.S. and China?
Helberg: I think the basic concept of trade reciprocity is incredibly important. One of the reasons the work that Bob Lighthizer and the Trump Administration did was so important was because they revisited sacred cows about what our expectations should be as a country when we engage with other players like China. For a long time, the basic assumption was we have to transfer all of our IP to Chinese manufacturers as the cost of doing business.
We've seen now 24 years into this experiment that IP is incredibly valuable. Tesla came out a couple of months ago saying that if we don't put tariffs on Chinese EVs, they are going to decimate the Western EV industry, not just Tesla, but Volvo, Volkswagen and the like.
We often thought we could keep running faster, and they're never going to catch up to us. That's just not the case. If the same factories that make Tesla cars can be turned around and use Tesla's IP to make a Chinese car that's pennies on the dollar, that model just doesn't work for our companies.
The commission I serve on was created in the wake of China joining the WTO, and every year our report to Congress has been that China fails to comply with its WTO commitments.
China will never comply, so that day will never come. They didn't comply in 2005. They didn't comply in 2015. They're not going to comply in 2025. We just need to revisit some of the core assumptions that were the underpinning for why we gave them the most favored nation status under US law.
Federal Newswire: It seems that we have big asymmetries with China in the area of AI–is this true?
Helberg: I think one of the big asymmetries is that our system is very open, so they have much better visibility into where we're at. A lot of our systems are open source. We're just a very open society in general. They are extremely opaque, so it actually makes our ability to benchmark where they're at significantly harder.
The consensus right now is that they're a little bit behind, not by a lot. ChatGPT took them by surprise. It's really thrown them into somewhat of a tailspin. They've rushed to try to catch up, which is great news. People in the tech industry estimate that they're behind, but, maybe it's 18 months to two years behind. They're not a decade behind.
The other asymmetry is the fact that they have a lot of human bodies to apply to the right problems, and so they graduate more computer science PhDs. They've doubled their number of computer science PhDs in the last few years, which is obviously a big asymmetry where our talent pool is more finite.
Now, with that being said, our system puts a huge emphasis on quality. So, there is somewhat of a debate in the US as to how good their engineers are. You can have a ton of engineers, but if they're bad engineers, they're not going to make a great product. I think a lot of people are still trying to parse through the evidence of what we actually know about the Chinese ecosystem, but their opacity makes it difficult.
The China Desk podcast is hosted by Steve Yates, a former president of Radio Free Asia and White House national security advisor.
