Ahead of tonight’s presidential debate, both President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump share the same fundamental vision for America’s future on the global stage: beat Beijing in the race for advanced technologies, and in so doing, pull far ahead of China in the competition for the world’s strongest economy. That’s led both candidates to adopt a surprisingly similar promote-and-protect strategy for technology, focused on containing China’s rise in fields like artificial intelligence, microchips and quantum while simultaneously advancing U.S. prowess in the same technologies. Both Trump and Biden see domestic tech innovation, including the resurgence of American high-tech manufacturing, as the path to staying ahead of China — particularly in AI, a technology each views as increasingly critical to U.S. global leadership in the 21st century. President Joe Biden has said “we are in a competition with China to win the 21st century” and that AI could be the “most consequential technology of our time.” And in his most extensive public comments on AI development, Trump declared last month: “We have to be at the forefront. It’s going to happen. And if it’s going to happen, we have to take the lead over China.” The Trump campaign did not respond when DFD asked how its candidate will discuss tech policy tonight. But the Biden campaign, at least, is hoping to put some daylight between the current president's own tech plans and Trump’s approach. "When Donald Trump was president he tried to cede our future to China, incentivizing wealthy corporations to ship jobs away and innovate overseas,” Biden campaign spokesperson Seth Schuster told DFD. “Joe Biden is making sure America is out-competing the world and bringing manufacturing home — investing to make sure we're harnessing the promise of technological innovations like AI, while lowering costs, creating jobs, and keeping Americans safe." Still, the two candidates are largely reading off of the same script, at least in some areas. For example, Biden’s tariffs on Chinese-made microchips and other tech imports from China are in many ways an extension of Trump’s tariff-heavy playbook. Likewise, both men have prioritized the return of high-tech manufacturing to U.S. shores — the Biden administration successfully convinced Congress to pour $52 billion into semiconductor subsidies, while Trump officials tried to broker deals to get chipmakers to build factories in the U.S. But Trump and Biden differ on other key tech questions, including the extent to which the U.S. and Chinese tech sectors should split from each other. Trump appears to be pushing for a total decoupling (his former national security advisor made the case for such an approach earlier this month), while the Biden administration has attempted to strategically target its economic restrictions by singling out specific technologies (what it calls the “small yard, high fence approach).” The Commerce Department’s export controls only apply to some technologies, like certain high-end chips and the advanced machinery used to make them. Biden has also displayed more willingness to coordinate with allies on restrictions, while Trump tended to opt for bilateral over multilateral agreements in his first term. Then there’s AI, a topic of intense interest in Washington and one that Owen Tedford, a senior research analyst at Beacon Policy Advisors, told DFD would be a huge priority in either candidate’s anti-China, pro-U.S. tech agenda. “They want to see the U.S. flourish and become the global leader in that industry,” Tedford said. “There would be an interest from either administration.” Biden has steered his AI policies around his October executive order, which contains mostly voluntary guidelines. He has used the AI debate as an opportunity to appeal to organized labor, calling workers the “North Star” in a set of workplace “principles” released by the Labor Department in May. Daniel Castro, an AI expert at the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, a think tank frequently aligned with industry, credited the Trump administration for launching America’s current AI strategy. “They put together one of the early works in terms of investing in AI throughout government, thinking about what it is,” Castro said. “But also then, the Biden administration came in and has done so much more.” Castro highlighted key differences between Trump and Biden on AI. He pointed to the Biden administration’s focus on addressing the potential for AI to promote bias, boost surveillance or harm civil rights, including through initiatives like the White House’s Blueprint for an AI Bill of Rights. Meanwhile, Trump seems to have become fixated on the notion of boosting energy production to satisfy the AI industry’s ravenous appetite for electricity. Speaking on the “All In” podcast last week, Trump said he supported federal investments in domestic energy production, including coal and nuclear power, to fuel AI computing and data centers. The podcast is hosted by David Sacks, a billionaire venture capitalist who recently hosted a Trump fundraiser. “We have to get back to energy. We're spending trillions of dollars on artificial, weak energy that's not going to fire up our plants,” Trump said on the podcast. “I realized the other day, more than anytime when we were at David's house and talking to a lot of geniuses from Silicon Valley and other places — they need electricity at levels that nobody's ever experienced before, to be successful, to be a leader in AI.” Trump’s stance sets him up for an AI policy clash with Biden, whose administration has promoted clean energy technologies as another engine of future economic growth, touting new jobs and projects from the Inflation Reduction Act. The Biden administration won’t be so quick to turn to coal, the dirtiest fossil fuel, to power AI. But given the AI industry’s tremendous need for reliable power, Tedford said a second Biden term likely won’t rule out fossil fuels entirely for powering data centers either. Instead, he said Biden is more likely to promote clean energy as a overall concept and hope for “incidential benefits,” such as a greater percentage of energy used by data centers coming from clean sources of power. There’s also a philosophical divide between Democrats and Republicans when it comes to regulating AI. Biden’s executive order invoked the Defense Production Act to force developers of advanced AI systems to report their activities to the federal government. Many conservatives have balked at the requirement, which could easily be rescinded in a new Trump administration. These are hardly small differences, and the outcome of November’s election is likely to significantly shift how Washington approaches AI and other emerging technologies. But the AI industry is also a juggernaut increasingly reshaping the global tech economy. And Tedford called it “unrealistic” to think that Trump or Biden “will be able to achieve enough through regulation or legislation that really, in some way, seriously inhibits the growth of the AI industry.” “There's only so much that can be achieved by either administration,” Tedford said. Mohar Chatterjee contributed to this report.
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