Mr. Trump noted in the summer of 2025  that “the United States is in a race to achieve global dominance in artificial intelligence,” which Joe Biden called “a defining technology of our era.” Universities help drive that race. Meta’s chief AI officer, Alexandr Wang, has argued that the rate of AI progress may be such that “you need to prevent all of our secrets from going over to our adversaries and you need to lock down the labs.”

Thousands of Chinese citizens are working and studying in such labs….In AI specifically, nearly 40% of top-tier researchers at U.S. institutions are of Chinese origin. Beijing is aggressively cultivating American-educated and American-employed researchers via the Thousand Talents program.

Blindly embracing academic cooperation with a geopolitical rival is absurd. Nobody suggests we should train Iranian nuclear physicists or Russian ballistics engineers. The U.S. wouldn’t have been better off collaborating more with Nazi Germany in the 1930s or with the Soviet Union during the Cold War. Why make an exception for a nation dedicated to surpassing the U.S. in emerging technologies?

Excerpt from  Mike Gallagher, Send Harvard’s Chinese Students Home, WSJ, Aug. 19, 2025