China Narrows The AI Gap. Costs Drop. The Supply Chain Is Code Now.
An op-ed by Indiana's former State Treasurer argues that Chinese companies are narrowing the AI capability gap while dramatically lowering the cost of building and running frontier AI. The author draws on 25 years of software experience and warns that foreign AI embedded in government software presents a supply chain dependency analogous to past crises in steel, semiconductors, and energy.
This demonstrates the principle of software supply chain dependency. The mechanism is embedded inference. When foreign-built AI models sit inside critical government software, the dependency is invisible but structural. The lesson is that code is now infrastructure, and infrastructure is now geopolitical.
The author leads the State Financial Officers Foundation's Digital Assets Task Force and previously served as Indiana's State Treasurer after 25 years building software. The op-ed frames the issue for state-level financial officers.
- Open any application you use daily and search its documentation or privacy policy for references to third-party AI or machine learning components.
- Check whether those components are domestic or foreign-sourced by looking at the vendor's headquarters location.
- Make a simple list of which software in your workflow depends on AI you cannot inspect, to understand the dependency the op-ed describes.