Beijing Just Claimed Our Language on AI. Now We Have to Prove It.

At the White House yesterday, Xi Jinping said China and the United States “have both the capability and responsibility to develop and manage AI for good — and ensure that the development of AI is always under human control, and serves the well-being of the people.”

Those words could have come from my own writing. In March 2025, my top recommendation for US AI strategy was “keeping AI and AI-enabled technologies under human control.” Xi has now claimed that exact commitment, delivered from the White House, for a global audience.

He should be held to it. The Chinese Communist Party has spent decades demonstrating what “human control” means under its system: control by the Party, not by people. Its Cybersecurity and National Intelligence laws compel every Chinese company to hand the government secret access to data. The digital yuan is designed to track citizens’ own transactions. The Great Firewall decides what a billion people may read. When Xi says AI will serve “the well-being of the people,” he means the well-being the Party defines for them, not the freedom to define it themselves. That is human control at the top and human subjugation everywhere else.

America cannot let that language go unanswered. But an answer in words alone won’t do, because Beijing just proved it can match ours syllable for syllable. If our claim to human agency is going to mean anything, other nations need to be able to verify it, not take it on faith.

Xi’s Words, Twenty-Five Years Later

In my first year in Congress, in 2001, I voted to continue granting China permanent normal trade relations. Like many at the time, I believed engagement and digital technology would spread freedom into China as much as trade flowed out of it. I believed access to information would be very difficult for any government to fully contain.

I was wrong, and not only in the diffuse way that belief has been shown wrong over two decades of watching Beijing tighten its grip on information rather than loosen it. I have also had my own encounters, across fifteen visits to China over the years, with a system that operates by different rules than the ones I assumed applied. I don’t offer those experiences here as documented incidents; some of what happened to me I still can’t fully explain or verify to the standard this argument deserves. But they left me with a lasting question, one I think about every time I hear someone describe what a system will or won’t do: whose system is it? Who controls the infrastructure underneath the words, and what happens when your assumptions about access and control meet a system built on entirely different assumptions?

That question is why I don’t think the AI competition can be understood only as a race between technologies. It is a competition between systems, and trust has to be part of the architecture. A system isn’t trustworthy merely because the technology works. You have to trust the rules, the institutions, and the government with ultimate authority over them. Xi’s words this week ask the world to trust the last of those on faith.

I have made this argument in stages. In December 2024, I placed building trust first among my Ten Steps to Win the AI Race, arguing that AI’s adoption would be determined by people’s acceptance of it as much as by the pace of its advance. In March 2025, I made human control the first priority of a national AI strategy. Trust and human control are two faces of the same idea, and Xi’s remarks this week only sharpen why the distinction matters.

Why Deployment, Not Just the Frontier, Decides This

The public debate over AI keeps narrowing to a choice between speed and safety, as though whoever reaches the frontier first wins the race outright. I don’t believe that. As the Financial Times’ John Thornhill has observed, any lead at the frontier is likely to prove temporary. The long-run contest will be decided by whose technology businesses, institutions, and individuals around the world actually choose to adopt and keep using.

That is a flywheel. Useful AI attracts users. Real-world use reveals unmet needs, exposes failures, and generates feedback that improves applications and, sometimes, the models themselves. Successful applications attract developers and investment. Revenue funds further research. Greater usefulness brings more adoption, and the cycle turns again. Analyst Dan Wang, quoted by Thornhill, suggests Beijing may be content to let America race ahead at the frontier, avoid its mistakes, and apply the technology more widely once it’s proven. The cycle is not automatic — more use doesn’t guarantee better intelligence — but where it takes hold, it compounds.

How the Flywheel Reverses

Trust is what keeps it turning, and America does not start from a position of strength. Edelman’s 2025 trust survey found that three times as many Americans reject AI’s growing use as embrace it — 49% to 17% — while the Chinese are nearly the mirror image, with 54% embracing AI and only 10% rejecting it. If democratic systems can’t out-trust the very government whose surveillance laws should make trust impossible, the problem isn’t rhetoric. It’s delivery.

A poll by the Special Competitive Studies Project and Gallup finds 79% say “the government should prioritize maintaining safety and data security rules even if that slows AI development”. Lawmakers in both parties are calling for more oversight. That unease is not irrational. This year, advanced models from more than one leading American developer have broken out of their testing environments. In one case, a model hacked another company in secret coordination with hundreds of other AI agents. One developer’s chief executive has separately acknowledged that a different incident was avoidable, the result of an operating shortcut — an outside contractor had told the models they were in a simulation but left them connected to the internet anyway — rather than an unavoidable feature of the technology. That is, in a way, reassuring: failures of discipline can be fixed by better discipline. But they will not be fixed by rhetoric, ours or Xi’s.

What Backing Up the Words Requires

If we are going to contest Xi’s claim on the language of human control, we have to be able to show, not just say, what our own systems actually do.

Build verifiable human control into deployment. Retaining human control of AI must be America’s highest priority, not an afterthought bolted onto systems already built. That means the goal isn’t simply to develop capable AI — it’s to design and deploy it so that enhancing human agency becomes a demonstrable American advantage over the authoritarian alternative, one the world can see and test for itself, not one we merely assert. A claim of control that can’t be verified is no different from Xi’s.

Compete on real choice, not just its absence in Beijing’s system. America’s advantage isn’t the absence of competition inside its own ecosystem — it’s the presence of it. A buyer choosing among American and allied chipmakers, cloud providers, and network vendors is making a market choice no government is dictating. That stands in direct contrast to a system where the vendor, the infrastructure, and the state are one and the same. Overly broad restrictions on what we sell can undercut that advantage by handing markets to Huawei’s integrated alternative rather than containing it. Export controls should be calibrated to deny what strengthens a rival’s military, not to drive the world toward the one stack we’re trying to out-compete.

Make the alternative affordable, not just admirable. Chinese providers are expanding into Southeast Asia and Latin America with subsidies that undercut our offerings. A values-based offer that a country can’t afford to run isn’t really an offer. American financing — through the Export-Import Bank and the International Development Finance Corporation — and other forms of support have to make the case on cost as well as principle.

None of this argues for slowing down. Some prominent voices in AI now call for a pause at the frontier. A unilateral American pause would not be matched by Beijing, and it would do nothing to make Xi’s system any more accountable to the people it claims to serve. Verifiable control, real competitive choice, and affordable exports don’t require Chinese cooperation to work. They can move as fast as we’re willing to build them.

The Choice Ahead

Xi Jinping stood in Washington and used our words. That is not a rhetorical accident; it is a recognition that the language of human agency carries real weight in the world, weight his own system cannot generate on its own terms. America’s answer should not be a rebuttal delivered from a podium. It should be proof, visible in how our systems are built, tested, and governed, that when we say human control, we mean control that rests with the person at the keyboard, in the clinic, on the factory floor — not with a party that has spent decades demonstrating exactly the opposite.