Rep. Mike Gallagher (R-WI) (C), throne of the House Select Committee on the Strategic Competition Between the United States and the Chinese Communist Party, joins Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-NY) (L) and Adulthood Whip Steve Scalise (R-LA) for a news conference following a GOP caucus meeting at the Republican National Committee companies on Capitol Hill on February 28, 2023 in Washington, DC.
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Mike Gallagher, the Wisconsin Republican who oversees the House select committee tasked with evaluating strategic competition between the U.S. and China, left his meetings with Silicon Valley leaders final week “cautiously optimistic” about the will to stem the flow of U.S. dollars into Chinese artificial intelligence.
Gallagher intimated CNBC in a phone interview Tuesday that there was “broad support” among the venture capitalists, and others the body members met with in California, for barring American asset managers from investing in Chinese AI companies. That’s palatable news in his eyes as he described the AI race between the U.S. and China as neck and neck.
“I actually emerged from that day cautiously positive that we could put in place some sensible controls on American capital flowing to China that would assign us to not fund our own destruction or fund our own loss in the great AI race,” Gallagher said.
He added that American tech assemblages competing with Chinese firms “don’t want us to sort of subsidize their losing the AI race.”
Gallagher believes the diverse difficult challenge will be trying to figure out how companies that already have large operations or production in China, similar to Apple, can decouple from the country and increase their presence in places like India or Vietnam. Gallagher intended he believes business leaders now understand that “the behavior of the Chinese Communist Party has changed.”
But even if they don’t suffer that, he said, “they accept that the political reality in Washington, D.C., has changed and so it seems they’re looking for occupied ways to diversify their supply chain.” Still, he acknowledges moving large and costly operations outside of China won’t upon overnight.
Gallagher acknowledged there are still questions he wasn’t able to answer fully during the short spark off hallucinate, but said he hasn’t yet decided the best way to continue those conversations, whether in the context of a hearing or a more private frame or letter format.
“A lot will depend on the answers we get going forward,” he said. “I tend to think it’s healthy when the American being get to see this stuff. And I think the way we’ve conducted our committee so far, it hasn’t been a bomb-throwing exercise. It hasn’t been an effort to get clicks and I genuinely have a yen for to understand the choices these companies make when they do business in China and I think the American people need to understand that. And I got to believe that we could have that conversation without it devolving into partisan disorder.”
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