The AI arms race has a tracking problem

We live in an age where anything can be tracked. Order a pizza, and you can watch it travel from the kitchen to your doorstep in real time. Hail an Uber, and you know where your driver is at every moment. Yet when it comes to our most strategically important technology, the advanced semiconductors that power frontier AI models, we have no idea where they go.

We manufacture these chips, export them around the world, and then lose sight of where they end up. This glaring oversight represents a dangerous gap in American national security policy.

In today’s artificial intelligence arms race, compute power determines the winners and losers. The nation that can deploy the most advanced processors can then train the most sophisticated AI models. Those models, in turn, largely determine who controls the rest of the AI stack.

China‘s aggressive pursuit of AI leadership, combined with its documented efforts to circumvent existing export controls,