Gordon Chang, a lawyer and prominent China policy critic, said Tuesday that the United States would face significant challenges enforcing any AI regulations on Chinese companies, arguing such oversight is effectively impossible to implement.
Chang made the remarks during an interview on NewsNation's "Jesse Weber Live" hours before President Trump arrived in Beijing for a summit with Chinese President Xi Jinping. The visit included tech executives Tesla CEO Elon Musk, who also runs xAI, and Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang traveling aboard Air Force One alongside the president.
"Cooperation and coordination with not just China, but all other nations in the world, that sounds like a good thing," Chang said. "The problem is in practice, it's not going to work."
What the Left Is Saying
Progressive policy analysts generally support international AI governance frameworks as essential for managing risks associated with artificial intelligence development. Organizations such as the Center for AI Safety and the Electronic Frontier Foundation have advocated for multilateral agreements on AI standards, arguing that unilateral enforcement is insufficient given the global nature of technology development.
"International coordination on AI safety standards is not optional — it's a necessity," wrote the Future of Life Institute in a recent policy paper. "The risks from ungoverned AI development affect all nations."
Democratic lawmakers have pointed to existing international frameworks for other dual-use technologies, such as nuclear materials and certain advanced semiconductors, as models that demonstrate enforcement is possible with sufficient political will and verification mechanisms.
What the Right Is Saying
Conservative analysts largely echo Chang's skepticism about enforceable AI agreements with China. Heritage Foundation technology policy fellows have argued that any regulatory regime dependent on Chinese compliance is fundamentally flawed given Beijing's history of intellectual property theft and technology transfer violations.
"The Communist Party has repeatedly demonstrated it will cheat on any agreement when national advantage is at stake," said one senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, speaking generally about U.S.-China tech competition. "We should not construct policy around optimistic assumptions."
Chang specifically advocated that U.S. companies should "race ahead" in AI development and establish global standards — excluding China from that framework. "If the US dominates AI, our global standards, product of a democracy, of a free society, will predominate over those of China," he said.
What the Numbers Show
The Center for AI Standards and Innovation, a U.S. government agency, issued an assessment earlier this month finding that Chinese company DeepSeek's V4 Pro AI model lags behind OpenAI's GPT-5.5 by approximately eight months in capability benchmarks.
Chang acknowledged during the interview that while the United States currently holds leads in AI development, those advantages are not insurmountable. "We've got these leads," he said. "They're not enormous leads. But we also have a sense that this is a really important competition, and the Chinese are very close behind us."
The competitive gap exists partly because, as Chang noted, "the Chinese government places no restrictions on the data" that its companies can use in training AI systems — a constraint absent for U.S. firms operating under certain privacy and copyright frameworks.
The Bottom Line
Trump's Beijing visit signals an effort to address technology competition through direct diplomacy rather than regulatory coordination. The president said one priority would be convincing Xi to open China's markets to U.S.-based tech companies, though Chang argued such negotiations face inherent limitations.
Whether the administration pursues international AI governance frameworks or focuses on maintaining competitive advantages through unilateral advancement remains a key policy question. Watch for any announcements from the Beijing summit regarding technology agreements and market access provisions.