China’s advances in artificial intelligence, robotics, and autonomous systems pose a growing national security risk, US lawmakers and industry experts said, with concerns ranging from data access and cyber vulnerabilities to supply-chain dependence and military use.
At a House Homeland Security subcommittee hearing, Chairman Andrew Garbarino said the challenge was already unfolding “inside the United States”.
He said the People’s Republic of China was moving “aggressively to dominate the technologies that are reshaping the global economy and security, including artificial intelligence, robotics and autonomous systems”.
Garbarino singled out Chinese AI firm DeepSeek and robotics company Unitree. He said DeepSeek had released a model in January 2025 that rivalled top American systems “at a claimed cost that was a fraction of what American companies invested”, shocking the market and prompting some to call it “an AI Sputnik moment”.
But he said the deeper concern was that DeepSeek “appeared to have fed outputs from leading American AI systems into its training pipeline, illicitly reverse engineering the capabilities those companies had developed through legitimate investment”. He added: “DeepSeek did not simply outcompete American companies. According to these disclosures, it stole from them.”
He also warned that the company’s app was available in the Apple App Store and that “every interaction is stored on servers located in the People’s Republic of China, where authorities can demand access to that data”. CWitnesses from industry and policy circles pressed for a tougher US response.