David Feith is a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, a former senior Asia policy official, and a commentator on US-China technology competition. He is a son of former Under Secretary of Defense Douglas Feith.
Background
Feith served as NSC Director for Asia during the first Trump administration, working in the National Security Council's Asia directorate under Matt Pottinger, the NSC Asia Coordinator. From 2020 to 2021 he held the position of Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs, covering US-China relations, Indo-Pacific strategy, and Southeast Asia. His prepared HPSCI statement of September 2026 identifies him additionally as a former National Security Council senior director for technology and national security (A New Counterintelligence Map for the AI Age (Feith, HPSCI, 2026-09-02)).
After leaving government he turned to editorial and commentary work, particularly on US-China relations and technology competition, and has been cited in the national security press on Indo-Pacific strategy and semiconductor geopolitics.
Positions on AI export controls
Feith signed the July 28, 2025 letter to Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick (Letter to Sec. Lutnick on H20 Restrictions (2025-07-28)), which urged the administration to reverse its decision to resume sales of Nvidia's H20 AI chip to China, characterizing that decision as a strategic misstep. The letter, carrying 20 signatories including Matt Pottinger and Stewart Baker, argued that the H20 is an advanced inference chip central to China's AI ambitions rather than an outdated one, that exporting it would leave fewer advanced chips for US buyers in a supply-constrained market, that the chips would support the People's Liberation Army through Military-Civil Fusion, and that the reversal would weaken export controls generally. Feith's position is therefore for tighter H20 restrictions, not against them.
Counterintelligence testimony (2026)
On September 2, 2026 Feith submitted a prepared statement, A New Counterintelligence Map for the AI Age, to the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence for its hearing Persistent Competition and Legacy Architectures; the hearing was held September 3 (A New Counterintelligence Map for the AI Age (Feith, HPSCI, 2026-09-02)). Its argument is that Cold War–era counterintelligence assumed strategically important technology sat inside government laboratories and a bounded defense-industrial base, whereas it now sits in frontier AI labs, semiconductor fabs, cloud platforms, data centers and venture-backed startups, so the counterintelligence perimeter must follow it there.
The statement names five ecosystems — sensitive sites and drone exposure, the power grid and data-center hardware, frontier AI labs, advanced compute and the semiconductor supply chain, and startups crossing what he calls a "counterintelligence threshold" — and five recommendations, including a Technology CI Mission led by the Intelligence Community, a government-industry security compact for frontier labs, and extension of CHIPS-style reindustrialization logic to drones, inverters and transformers. On export policy it develops a capability-oriented rather than transaction-oriented frame, arguing that China should not be able to "buy, rent, smuggle, steal, or build" its way around US technology controls (Export Controls (AI), Chip Smuggling and Export-Control Evasion).
This position is continuous with the H20 letter: both treat advanced compute as the principal chokepoint in the US-China competition and argue against measures that erode it.
Relationships
- signed: Letter to Sec. Lutnick on H20 Restrictions (2025-07-28) — co-signatory urging reversal of resumed H20 sales to China
- authored: A New Counterintelligence Map for the AI Age (Feith, HPSCI, 2026-09-02) — HPSCI prepared statement, September 2026
- affiliated-with: Hudson Institute — senior fellow
- formerly-worked-with: Matt Pottinger — NSC colleagues; Pottinger was NSC Asia Coordinator during Feith's NSC tenure
- related: Stewart Baker — co-signatory on the H20 letter
- related: Export Controls (AI) — the H20 letter and the 2026 testimony are both documents in the US AI export-control debate
- related: BIS Framework for AI Diffusion — Interim Final Rule (Jan 13, 2025) — regulatory context for H20 restrictions
- related: US-China AI Competition: Different Races, Different Metrics