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US Weighs Restricting Chinese Investment In Artificial Intelligence (reuters.com)
An anonymous reader shares a Reuters report: The United States appears poised to heighten scrutiny of Chinese investment in Silicon Valley to better shield sensitive technologies seen as vital to U.S. national security, current and former U.S. officials tell Reuters. Of particular concern is China's interest in fields such as artificial intelligence and machine learning, which have increasingly attracted Chinese capital in recent years. The worry is that cutting-edge technologies developed in the United States could be used by China to bolster its military capabilities and perhaps even push it ahead in strategic industries. The U.S. government is now looking to strengthen the role of the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS), the inter-agency committee that reviews foreign acquisitions of U.S. companies on national security grounds. An unreleased Pentagon report, viewed by Reuters, warns that China is skirting U.S. oversight and gaining access to sensitive technology through transactions that currently don't trigger CFIUS review.
It's a shortsighted policy: instead of the Chinese investing money in US research, they'll invest money in Chinese research.
The end result is they'll get the technology they want, and the US won't get the benefits of the research. That's how we ended up with China having manned spaceflight capabilities while the US doesn't, and how we ended up with China having the most powerful supercomputers.
Chinese strategy since mid-200x: seal new economic opportunities, let the enemy run out of possible moves.
Rare earth metal mining, and all of new industries orbiting it - nuked mid 200x
"Big solar" - went throught "slash and burn" acquisition
Battery tech - again, all worthy companies got sold to Chinese before they had an opportunity to make a dent on Chinese battery monopoly
"New nuclear" - in Chinese pocket since 2015
The entire field of bioinformatics eaten by China before it even had a chance to emerge
This list can go on for few pages