Donald Trump\u2019s willingness to offer concessions to Russia risks forcing Ukraine into an unreasonable peace. It would prove that European borders can still be redrawn by force, with all that means for security on the Continent.<\/p>\n
But another concession by the US president to an autocratic power could have just as profound an impact on geopolitics and the course of the 21st century.<\/p>\n
On Monday, Trump overturned a policy he had pioneered in his first term and announced that Nvidia would be allowed to sell its H200 chip<\/a> to China. This is not the tech giant\u2019s most advanced chip \u2014 the Blackwell is still subject to an export ban \u2014 but it is six times more powerful than the best chip that could previously be exported to Beijing. It is also better than any chip a Chinese company is expected to produce in the next two years.<\/p>\n The significance of this decision should not be underestimated. It substantially increases the chance of China catching up with the West in the AI race, and then swiftly overtaking it. As Dario Amodei, the CEO of Anthropic\u2014where I am a senior adviser\u2014has argued, whether the West or China wins the AI race is a matter of profound geopolitical, as well as economic, importance. The US\u2019s principal advantage is its superior hardware \u2014 these chips \u2014 and Trump has just narrowed that gap. DeepSeek, China\u2019s leading AI company, has been clear that the biggest thing holding it back is a lack of Nvidia chips.<\/p>\n Export controls are not perfect, but they are the only real tool the West has to impede China\u2019s AI development. They were working, too. Since their introduction, the US\u2019s share of global computing power has increased by close to 50 per cent, while China\u2019s has pretty much halved. This matters because compute power is perhaps the single most important, and limiting, factor in developing advanced AI.<\/p>\n Why should we care? Because this decision makes it more likely that the world ends up running on Chinese technology \u2014 with all that means for security, privacy and our values. <\/p>\n If you doubt that, just ask DeepSeek what happened at Tiananmen Square. It will refuse to answer. If you ask it what is happening in Xinjiang, where millions of Uighur muslims are being persecuted, it will tell you that \u201cXinjiang is a beautiful region of China where people of all ethnic groups live in harmony\u201d. <\/p>\n \u2022 How China wages vast campaign against dissidents beyond its borders<\/a><\/p>\n When I worked in finance, I took a relaxed view of China\u2019s rise. It was surely good that one of the world\u2019s most populous countries was becoming richer and part of the global economy. But my time in government changed my views.<\/p>\n Beijing\u2019s doctrine of civil-military fusion means it is naive to distinguish between Chinese companies and the Chinese state, and to imagine that chips sent to companies would not end up in military applications. <\/p>\n It should be impossible to ignore what the head of MI5, Sir Ken McCallum, calls the \u201cepic scale\u201d of Chinese espionage in the UK. It is also clear that China\u2019s strategy is to make advanced economies dependent on it, as it has with rare earths, and then use that as leverage, while ensuring that the Chinese themselves are totally self-sufficient.<\/p>\n