'I Cannot, For The Life Of Me, Understand Two Decisions That Have Been Made...': Elissa Slotkin

Added: 2026-05-26

[00:00:00]Thank you. Yeah, I mean I think what you're hearing is is that there's a lot there's a lot of questions about how this governance should be done.

[00:00:10]Um and I am just keenly aware that unlike the nuclear race, right? Who can get to a nuclear weapon first, right?

[00:00:17]The Oppenheimer story.

[00:00:19]Um where that research and all that funding and all that supporting that development that went on in the middle of the desert to get us to a nuclear weapon was paid for by the US government, sponsored by the US government, not a private sector company.

[00:00:35]And fast forward to today, the private sector is really where the just powerful innovation is happening.

[00:00:45]Um and it I think it puts even more onus on all of us to have that conversation separate from each company um on what the governance should be for AI. And I I do not believe that an a private sector company should get to decide what the rules are, but I got to be honest, I think it is part of our congressional role up here to provide left and right limits um that provide some guidelines for how we govern this very new technology. And just like Congress did in the nuclear age, right? It wasn't like um we just said, "Hey, private sector, go bonkers. We now discovered nuclear energy and nuclear weapons. No oversight needed from Congress. Let us know how it works out." It was given that it had the potential for life and death. It had real oversight from this body with input from everybody. But I just I I feel very strongly. And I I think um also in that time, right? It's not like before we started the arms control conversation, I trusted that the Soviet Union would always do the right thing with nukes. Of course they were willing to do things that we weren't willing to do, but I'm not willing to sacrifice our values with this next generation of technology and just say, "Well, the Chinese are going to do bad things towards us, so we should say no rules." And I was very glad to hear actually that President Trump and Xi Jinping actually did seem to talk about some sort of guardrails on AI even generally at the summit.

[00:02:16]Um but I just want to go back, Under Secretary Michael, to your comments and the importance of winning the race, right? Cuz I again, I think there's also bipartisan support for winning the race.

[00:02:27]Um and how important it is to get there first. Um and um your concerns about the Chinese and distillation and kind of stealing our AI models or learning and and taking So, it's you've you've laid out how important it is to win. You've laid out how they're stealing. Um Um given the strategic importance of winning, I cannot, for the life of me, understand two decisions that have been made.

[00:02:54]Number one, the the decision, excuse me, to sell Nvidia chips to the Chinese.

[00:03:01]Um giving them not our most sophisticated, but some of our most sophisticated chips and chips they do not have.

[00:03:08]Um And then, secondly, I do not understand picking a fight with one of the few companies, Anthropic, that's in all of your systems. All of you use Anthropic right now.

[00:03:20]Um To the point where we've named them a supply chain risk, and all of you are supposed to be divesting from Anthropic in the next 2 months.

[00:03:28]Help me understand um given what you said about IP theft, why we're selling them some of our most sophisticated chips, and why we're kicking out one of the top three, and you know, AI companies from all of your classified systems.

[00:03:46]Yeah, so um on the chips question, um the uh this is a bit so this is a debate within technology industry which is Um if you sell an adversary uh older chips, do you slow down their domestic production of equivalent chips because they become reliant on your technology?

[00:04:09]That's one theory.

[00:04:10]And then the programming language on those chips to the developers, which are really important in AI because they develop on top of these chips and on top of these technology stacks. If they become used to the American stack, is that net better for the American AI proliferate proliferation? And that's a that's a debate in and the White House has decided that if we give them two versions behind chips, that we'd be able to preserve our our dominance on the programming language and um make it less encouraging of them to develop their own domestic chip industry to catch up. But do you have any evidence based on what you said a minute ago about their theft, their rampant theft of IP? Mhm. Their rampant ability and desire to, you know, work backwards from our technology, from cars to drones to chips to whatever.

[00:05:01]What evidence do you have that giving them this technology uh gets them addicted rather than um they just steal it and reverse engineer it for their own purposes?

[00:05:14]Well, it's you can it's very hard to redu- reverse engineering in this particular category of chips is not uh possible given sort of the steps in the chain. You have TSMC, the chip manufacturer. You have the lithography machines that make There there's a a whole chain of things that they would have to do to be able to reverse engineer and replicate that. Um that being said, I think um the number of chips also matters. If you think about what one data center in the US has, the biggest one has 250,000 chips in one data center. Uh the kind of chip numbers that we were talking about in total for export for a country that's four times our size in terms of population was less than that in one data center. So, this wasn't It's not a sort of broad, "Hey, go sell everything to anyone at any time." And numbers matter in this in this race. As you said before, the amount of electricity, the number of chips, how many data centers we have, are they interconnected, and does the data flow in the right way to them? So, I think this could be that we're making too much maybe of this one um sort of fig leaf if it was.

[00:06:22]Um but I'll want to if you're open, I'll go to the second question.

[00:06:28]I'm I'm over time here. Maybe we can come back to it and we'll and we'll come back on Thrapp book. Thank