Q&A with Matt Sheehan, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, on US-China AI race, distillation, US chip export controls, and more (New York Times)

The article frames the US-China AI race as a strategic competition that will shape access to advanced models, chips, and the pace of innovation, with direct implications for cost, supply chains, and geopolitical risk. For CIOs and technology leaders, the key takeaway is that AI capability is increasingly tied to external policy and infrastructure constraints—not just internal model development—so IT organizations must plan for volatility in compute availability, vendor choices, and compliance requirements. The discussion of distillation and chip export controls suggests that competitive advantage may come as much from efficient model deployment and governance as from frontier model access.