Matt Pottinger is a former US Deputy National Security Adviser who served during Trump's first term (2019–2021) and a former Wall Street Journal reporter in China. He is a China-policy hawk active in debates over AI export controls.
Background
Before government service, Pottinger worked as a Wall Street Journal reporter based in China. He served as US Deputy National Security Adviser from 2019 to 2021, during Trump's first term.
Positions on AI and China policy
Pottinger is among the prominent China-hawk voices on AI export controls, and frames US-China AI competition as a decisive 21st-century national-security issue.
Chip capability gap
With Anthropic chief executive Dario Amodei, Pottinger co-wrote a Wall Street Journal op-ed on preserving America's AI advantage over China. Amodei quoted it in his January 2025 essay on DeepSeek and export controls: "China's best AI chips, the Huawei Ascend series, are substantially less capable than the leading chip made by U.S.-based Nvidia. China also may not have the production capacity to keep pace with growing demand. There's not a single noteworthy cluster of Huawei Ascend chips outside China today, suggesting that China is struggling to meet its domestic needs" (Dario Amodei — On DeepSeek and Export Controls; Source: wsj.com).
H20 export letter
He signed the July 28, 2025 letter to Secretary Lutnick urging reversal of Nvidia H20 chip exports to China (see Letter to Sec. Lutnick on H20 Restrictions (2025-07-28)), one of 20 signatories alongside Stewart Baker and David Feith; he signed as "Former Deputy National Security Advisor." The letter, hosted by Americans for Responsible Innovation, called the decision to resume H20 sales "a strategic misstep," argued that the H20 is an inference-optimized chip that outperforms the already-restricted H100 on inference tasks, and asked the Commerce Department to "continue blocking the sale of advanced AI chips to China" (Letter to Sec. Lutnick on H20 Restrictions (2025-07-28)). The letter has been characterized as a MAGA-aligned critique of the administration's H20 reversal rather than a Democratic critique, and Pottinger's participation connects the first-Trump-administration national-security establishment to second-Trump-administration policy debates.
Relationships
- related: Dario Amodei — On DeepSeek and Export Controls, Dario Amodei — co-author of the WSJ op-ed quoted in the essay
- related: Americans for Responsible Innovation (ARI) — host of the H20 letter
- related: Letter to Sec. Lutnick on H20 Restrictions (2025-07-28), Export Controls (AI), CSET + DOJ + CSIS — US-China AI National-Security Axis (composite source summary), CSIS — DeepSeek, Huawei, Export Controls, and the Future of the U.S.-China AI Race (Allen, March 2025), Nvidia & TSMC — AI Compute Infrastructure, DeepSeek.