Taking the Wrong Lesson from China’s AI Strategy
The United States is mimicking China’s approach to centralized data, risking privacy, security and democratic accountability in the name of AI leadership.
Chinese leaders early on recognized the importance of data for artificial intelligence (AI). In 2015, officials announced incentives to treat data as a key factor of production. More recently, China became the first country to create official markets for data. Chinese policy makers developed standards that enabled private entities to claim data as an asset on balance sheets. But China may have made a data “misstep.” In 2014, Beijing announced that it would allow government agencies to share data about Chinese companies and citizens, create a centralized scoring mechanism to assess the financial creditworthiness of individuals and companies, and use that data to nudge citizens toward state-sanctioned “moral values.” Observers noted that the plan has yielded mixed results, and spillover effects such as corruption and distrust. Nonetheless, on April 1, 2025, the government announced new guidelines on the social credit system, intended to create a “unified national market.”
Although the Trump administration has worked to thwart China’s AI leadership, it is copying some aspects of China’s data policies by creating a unified federal data set.
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