Technology: The Race is On

The second Donald Trump administration inherits a Washington significantly more unified on the technology threat from the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and on the imperative for American innovation competitiveness. Allies in Europe and the Indo-Pacific have begun to come along, even if some more readily than others. But the nascent and fragile consensus must hold, and a kick in the pants is needed for democracies to win the strategic technology competition vis-à-vis autocrats.

An Era of Rapid Technological Innovation

The decisive decade in technology competition is underway, and the pace of innovation is expanding rapidly with deep implications for security, geopolitics, and democracy. Who develops, applies, and integrates cutting-edge advances in artificial intelligence (AI), biotechnology, quantum information, and emerging industries most effectively will determine which countries control the 21st century’s means of production—and whether these systems are built and governed to underpin or undermine freedom and democracy.

The coming months and years will see a transition from initial large language models to transformative applications of generative AI across diverse industries from medicine to agriculture to logistics. In medicine, one study found that ChatGPT alone outperformed human clinicians and human-AI teams in diagnosing medical conditions from patient reports. In agriculture, farmers in India piloting AI tools for soil testing, quality testing, and chatbot advisories saw a 21% increase in plant growth using less pesticide and fertilizer. And breakthroughs in quantum chip technology that achieve robust error correction now complete in five minutes the computations that would take the world’s fastest supercomputer 10 septillion years. This development brings us closer to the construction of fault-tolerant quantum computers that could upend modern encryption.

As generative AI images, video, and audio improve, deepfake content has also proliferated from crisis to crisis, creating a new genre of information graffiti known as “AI slop”. Democracy itself is not immune. In the last year, GMF’s Spitting Images Electoral Deepfakes tracker identified 177 election deepfakes in 31 countries. On the flip side, democracy-affirming technologies that empower users with transparency are also on the rise, presenting opportunities for innovation. The now 3700-member-strong Content Authenticity Initiative builds provenance information into images and videos, creating digital “ingredient lists” that follow content around the internet as tamper-resistant records of authenticity. Major technology, media, and camera companies including Google, Amazon, Adobe, BBC, CBC, Sony, and Nikon, to name just a few, are adopting this technology in tools, software, and reporting.

Autocrats Advancing

The geopolitical landscape today also looks different from four or eight years ago, with the PRC becoming more dominant in critical technology industries, advancing cyber capabilities, and increasing technology cooperation with Russia through the two countries’ “no-limits” partnership.

In 2015, Beijing released its landmark Made in China 2025 industrial plan, aiming to revolutionize its economy from that of a low-cost manufacturing base to a high-tech superpower. Based originally on Germany’s Industry 4.0 plan, Made in China 2025 identified leadership goals in 10 critical industries from advanced computing and biotechnology to new energy vehicles and storage. It was a wake-up call to the West, so much so that the Chinese Communist Party quickly stopped talking about the plan for fear of provoking further backlash. Now, in 2025, the PRC has succeeded in many of these technology goals. The country’s firms produce nearly two-thirds of the world’s electric vehicles (EVs) and more than three-quarters of EV batteries. They leverage a record 3.5 million 5G base stations to implement industrial internet projects worldwide. In the field of biotechnology, subsidies, incentives, and partnerships deliver fast strides. Between 2017 and 2022, clinical trials doubled, and an emphasis on bulk biometric data collection has meant that the PRC now holds more genetic sequencing data on Americans than the United States itself does.

The PRC-Russia rapprochement has also seen a deepening in technology cooperation. Binnopharm Group, one of Russia’s largest pharmaceutical manufacturers, with a portfolio 450 medicines strong, was a creation of the Russia-China Investment Fund. PRC and Russian scientists established quantum communication between ground stations near Moscow and Urumqi, planting the seeds for a quantum BRICS internet. Meanwhile, significant cyberattacks from PRC state-backed groups Salt Typhoon and Silk Typhoon demonstrate increased sophistication, penetrating US networks and gaining access to calls and texts of high-level politicians including the president and vice president. 

No longer a prospective threat, today’s PRC is a fierce competitor with the ambition and ability to lead in tomorrow’s technologies. The new administration must take deliberate, smart, and sustained action leading democratic allies and partners to win the technology race.

A Fragile China Consensus

Trump’s first term spurred an awakening in Washington to the threat that unfettered integration with the PRC posed to liberal democracies, especially that regarding technology-centric issues of intellectual property theft, espionage through cyber and 5G communications networks, and surveillance-enabled human rights abuses in Xinjiang and beyond. That view has only grown stronger, louder, and more bipartisan over the last eight years, as evidenced by major technology competition legislation in the CHIPS and Science Act and technology security legislation to force a sale of TikTok, both adopted with overwhelming bipartisan support. Retreating from this consensus would be disastrous.

Europe is starting to see the challenge, and policymakers have made major strides at least in words, even if their actions are slower. European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen introduced a de-risk strategy for high-tech areas including microelectronics, quantum computing, robotics, AI, and biotechnology. Under her leadership, the Commission has also begun to pursue a clear-eyed techno-economic security agenda. It includes beefing up screening and restrictions on technology investment flows to China, taking up unfair intellectual property practices in the World Trade Organization, imposing duties on Chinese battery electric vehicles (BEVs) to combat unfair subsidies, and issuing a landmark report on European competitiveness whose “most important” imperative was to close the innovation gap. Yet not everyone has gone along with the program. Berlin finally agreed to oust Huawei from its 5G networks—an effort Trump’s first administration pushed—but only in time for the arrival of 6G. The EU-wide BEV tariffs were almost kiboshed by an aggressive campaign from German Chancellor Olaf Scholz himself.

The United States needs quick action from its allies and a more robust transatlantic consensus on the PRC. But if Washington wavers in its resolve or goes too far in alienating Europe, it risks driving the continent back toward a self-defeating balancing act between the PRC and the United States.

Policy Recommendations

To put the United States’ best foot forward in a heated and rapidly evolving geopolitical competition, the second Trump administration should undertake the following measures.

Build US and allied technology power by:

• identifying and investing in critical applications of generative AI. The United States has a head start on generative AI models. It needs to be first to apply and integrate them successfully across key future industries. Building off the White House Critical and Emerging Technologies List, the administration should select five to 10 critical application areas of AI and prioritize investments and public-private partnerships to drive their innovation.
• doubling down on US and allied biotechnology leadership. The administration should create a democratic biodata initiative with like-minded partners, such as the Quad, to fuel high-quality research in genomics and the biotechnology applications of AI. It should also launch AI and biotechnology moonshot initiatives that apply AI advances to stated priorities from ending chronic disease to advancing synthetic biology, conducting several with European technology centers.
• ensuring the US lead on quantum and forge transatlantic cooperation. The administration should support public-private initiatives to crowd-in capital, attract talent, and build regional quantum hubs. It should use its purchasing power to accelerate the adoption of post-quantum cryptography in the United States and extend those standards to Five Eyes nations and NATO defense systems.
• working with Congress to appropriate the science aspect of the CHIPS and Science Act. Key provisions for US innovation competitiveness of the $200 billion “science portion” of the law were authorized but remain unfunded. 

Directly confront the PRC technology threat by:

• upholding the Washington consensus on the PRC and wield US power to strengthen it abroad. Many players have a stake in US policy toward Beijing, but now is not the time to upset the apple cart. Trump should send a clear signal, guided by his key national security advisers, on the importance of outcompeting the PRC on technology and put European action atop the transatlantic priority list.
• forcing a sale of TikTok and then working with Congress to pass comprehensive legislation on autocratic apps. Backtracking on TikTok will send the wrong message to allies and adversaries alike. The new administration should resolve the TikTok issue and then build a framework that can handle the next PRC app to go viral. It should promote this framework to key US allies and partners, beginning with the Quad and Five Eyes.
• developing a common operating picture of the PRC technology threat for a data-driven understanding of technology competition. The new administration should establish a National Technology Competitiveness Analysis Center to perform red-blue team analyses in key technology industries and adopt a technology stack framework for understanding PRC penetration of network infrastructure (5G/6G, satellites, undersea cables), data and cloud services, devices, applications, and governance.
• strategically implementing a techno-economic security toolkit with European and Indo-Pacific partners. Work closely with the European Commission to harmonize outbound investment screening regimes in biotech, quantum, AI, and semiconductors.

Operationalize foreign policy for strategic technology goals by:

• directing the US-EU Trade and Technology Council toward concrete outcomes and milestones. Prioritize joint technical and policy projects such as building a transatlantic AI cloud, conducting privacy-preserving machine learning pilots, and pursuing joint funding models for transatlantic innovation. Move the trade agenda to a different forum.
• launching a new multilateral export control regime for the modern technology era. A replacement for the Wassenaar Arrangement is sorely needed due to Russia’s presence and outmoded ideas on dual-use technology.
• assisting with developing Europe’s defense technological base. Integrate lessons from Ukraine on drones and cyber into NATO planning.
• building high-quality technology infrastructure requirements into allied and transatlantic digital development policy. Bring back the Blue Dot network from the first Trump administration to provide a democratic technological offering to third countries.

Lindsay Gorman is the managing director and a senior fellow of the GMF Technology Program.