“They kind of shot themselves in the foot on this one. From Beijing's perspective, they don't want to see more export controls. But now, because of this potential Chinese spy, they've tainted the one man who has been advocating the most for loosening export controls. It has really galvanized the Democrats who have been criticizing the Trump administration about not being tougher on these export controls.”
Decoder with Nilay Patel · Tech Strategy & Big Tech · November 2026
Context
Nilay Patel asked what China could have hoped to gain, given that the spy story destabilized the American AI economy. Kyle Chan, a Brookings China Center fellow, says the scandal may backfire on Beijing's own goals.
Transcript
…right now, a lot of people are just more wondering, you know, nuts and bolts: is this technology going to cost me my job tomorrow? You know, is it actually useful? Is it impacting my university studies? Those are things that maybe are more sort of impactful day to day for most ordinary Americans.
…man. What truly would the Chinese government hope to gain from that? Because in one way, they've actually achieved a victory here, right? They've destabilized the American AI economy, but it doesn't seem like that was the goal. Like they're furiously denying that any of this even happened. There
is another sort of very kind of intuitive take, which is they kind of shot themselves in the foot on this one. So from Beijing's perspective, right, they don't want to see more export controls. They might want to see a loosening. But now they, because of this potential Chinese spy, now they've kind of tainted the one man who has been advocating the most for loosening export controls. In some ways, now they've like taken out someone who had otherwise, for sort of like sheer commercial reasons, been like more aligned. And who's going to take that place? And if anything, now it has really charged, especially the Democrats who have been criticizing the Trump administration about not being tougher on these expert controls. It has really galvanized the Democrats on this front and made it more of an issue, perhaps than it was before.
Especially when you connect it to corruption and the AI industry wasting money. It's all there for them. Tell me more broadly about Chinese spying in the AI industry. There was a report, I don't know, a few months ago, that OpenAI was warning its employees that spies abound, that if suddenly…
All I can say here is that they are juicy targets, right? So the US AI labs, anyone who's involved with sort of like cutting-edge frontier AI or AI chip production, chip design, they would be juicy targets for Chinese intelligence gathering because this is something where China is trying to catch…
Meanwhile, they're putting all their information into Slack and getting breached on the daily. Who knows these warnings are taking off. Last set of questions here. I'm thinking about Apple and Tesla, where we moved our manufacturing to China. We moved our supply chains to China, the Chinese…
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