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The United States appears poised to heighten scrutiny of Chinese investment in Silicon Valley to better shield sensitive technologies seen as vital to national security, said current and former US officials.
Of particular concern is China's interest in fields such as artificial intelligence and machine learning, which have increasingly attracted Chinese capital in recent years.
The worry is that cutting-edge technologies developed in the United States could be used by China to bolster its military capabilities and perhaps even push it ahead in strategic industries.
The US government is now looking to strengthen the role of the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS), the inter-agency committee that reviews foreign acquisitions of US companies on national security grounds.
An unreleased Pentagon report warns that China is skirting US oversight and gaining access to sensitive technology through transactions that currently don't trigger CFIUS review.
Such deals would include joint ventures, minority stakes and early-stage investments in start-ups.
Internet giant from China, Baidu, and
Silicon Valley 's Uber reached deal on strategic cooperation.
Defense Secretary Jim Mattis weighed into the debate on Tuesday, calling CFIUS "outdated" and telling a Senate hearing: "It needs to be updated to deal with today's situation."
CFIUS is headed by the Treasury Department and includes nine permanent members including representatives from the departments of Defense, Justice, Homeland Security, Commerce, State and Energy.
The CFIUS panel is so secretive it normally does not comment after it makes a decision on a deal.
Under former President Barack Obama, CFIUS stopped a series of attempted Chinese acquisitions of high-end chip makers.
Senator John Cornyn, the No. 2 Republican in the Senate, is now drafting legislation that would give CFIUS far more power to block some technology investments, a Cornyn aide said.
"Artificial intelligence is one of many leading-edge technologies that China seeks and that has potential military applications," said the Cornyn aide, who declined to be identified.
"These technologies are so new that our export control system has not yet figured out how to cover them, which is part of the reason they are slipping through the gaps in the existing safeguards," the aide said.
Google's AI AlphaGo
has defeated top Go masters from across the world.
The legislation would require CFIUS to heighten scrutiny of buyers hailing from nations identified as potential threats to national security.
CFIUS would maintain the list, the aide said, without specifying who would create it.
But some industry experts warn that stronger US regulations may not succeed in halting technology transfer and might trigger retaliation by China, with economic repercussions for the United States.
China made the United States the top destination for its foreign direct investment in 2016, with 45.6 billion US dollars in completed acquisitions and greenfield investments, according to the Rhodium Group, a research firm. Investment from January to May 2017 totaled 22 billion US dollars, which represented a 100 percent increase against the same period last year, it said.
"There will be a significant pushback from the technology industry" if legislation is overly aggressive, Rhodium Group economist Thilo Hanemann said.
(CGTN)
