Scott Bessent wants you to stop worrying about AI taking your job and start worrying about AI giving China the upper hand in a conflict.
Speaking at the Economic Club of New York on June 24, the US Treasury Secretary labeled China’s advancements in artificial intelligence as the “biggest risk” facing the technology. His argument: if Beijing pulls ahead in AI, American defense systems and the broader technology stack that supports them become effectively useless.
The national security reframe
Bessent has positioned himself as the primary point of contact for the US-China economic relationship and AI policy, a dual mandate that gives him unusual influence over how the world’s two largest economies compete on what may be the most consequential technology of the century.
His warning landed alongside a more specific allegation: that Chinese companies, including firms associated with Moonshot AI, have been distilling elements from US AI systems. In plain terms, that means reverse-engineering American models to extract their capabilities without doing the expensive research and development work.
