"The Tech High Ground" is an essay by Jake Sullivan, former US National Security Adviser under the Biden administration, published online by Foreign Affairs on April 15, 2026 and in the magazine's May/June 2026 issue (Source: foreignaffairs.com). It sets out a framework for how the United States should compete with China across frontier technology sectors — semiconductors, AI, biotechnology, and clean energy — and is Sullivan's first major foreign-policy essay since leaving the Biden National Security Council. The essay reframes the competition away from a "race to a finish line" toward sustained establishment of advantage across the full stack from invention to production to diffusion, and reads as a retrospective assessment of Biden-era policy alongside a critique of the Trump administration's approach.
Summary of argument
Sullivan argues that US strategy should simultaneously secure four areas of structural advantage, which he frames as four areas of "high ground":
- Techno-industrial base. Revitalizing not only innovation but production capacity, supply chain resilience, and manufacturing know-how. Sullivan argues that "When manufacturing leaves, process engineering know-how follows," and that severing design from production erodes the feedback loops that sustain leadership. He cites Operation Warp Speed's coordination of risk, demand, and supply as a model for rapid government-industry coordination.
- Military innovation for deterrence. Cheap, abundant autonomous drones, uncrewed surface vehicles, and distributed sensors, combined with long-range precision strikes, to impose prohibitive costs on adversary action, especially in the Taiwan Strait. Sullivan places AI at the center, writing that "AI-enabled systems already play a growing role in optimizing logistics, analyzing intelligence, detecting cyber-vulnerabilities, and identifying military targets." He emphasizes responsible adoption through human-machine teams and ethical norms, arguing that guardrails enable rather than hinder military effectiveness.
- Democratic digital order. Global adoption of the US technology stack — cloud, chip designs, safety protocols, technical standards — as an alternative to what he calls China's "operating system for authoritarianism." This includes standards bodies, AI safety evaluations, synthetic-biology guardrails, US commercial diplomacy at scale, and subsidized technology access for the Global South.
- US-China stability floor. Competition pursued without regard to its risks, Sullivan argues, could lead to dangerous proliferation or loss of control. He cites the 2024 Biden-Xi pledge on human control of nuclear weapons as a model, along with cooperation on climate and medical research and sustained communication on the Taiwan Strait.
Key claims
On export controls, Sullivan defends the "small yard, high fence" approach: "This means being selective in what the United States controls (a small yard), focusing only on the most sensitive technologies that will define national security and strategic competition, and then securing this small yard with tight restrictions." He defends the Biden-era chip controls against the argument that they backfired, writing that "Chinese leaders had already declared this to be a top national priority and poured a massive amount of attention and public resources into the country's domestic chip sector before those controls were contemplated." Sullivan presents this as a counter to the critique that controls pushed China toward self-sufficiency.
On allied coordination, Sullivan uses the term "allied scale" to describe the United States and its partners coordinating industrial strategies so that investments by one country reinforce collective capacity. He acknowledges that the Trump administration "has undermined allied alignment" and calls for a "determined diplomatic effort, likely over many years, to regain credibility with allies." He cites the CHIPS Act and the Inflation Reduction Act as models and AUKUS as a technology-transfer accelerator.
On China's strategy, Sullivan argues that China is not running the same race but is pursuing production, scale, and control of what he describes as critical input nodes — rare earths, pharmaceutical precursors, batteries — rather than innovation leadership per se. He argues China has "gotten much better at technological breakthroughs" after capturing supply chains, and describes a battery pattern as the template: capture the supply chain, accelerate innovation, reach 70% of global production, and repeat in biotechnology, with robotics as the next target.
On responsible AI adoption, Sullivan argues that norms around lethal autonomous weapons and AI ethics are strategically beneficial rather than only moral constraints: "Ensuring security and trustworthiness will not slow the United States and its allies down. It will ultimately enable them to move faster." He presents this as a counterpoint to the claim that guardrails hurt competitiveness.
Relation to other sources
Sullivan's framework overlaps with and diverges from several other positions documented elsewhere. Both Sullivan and Dario Amodei support "small yard, high fence" export controls, and both identify China's civilian-military fusion and manufacturing dominance as structural advantages; Sullivan's framework is broader, also covering allied scale and the techno-industrial base, and more retrospective in its defense of Biden-era policy (Dario Amodei — On DeepSeek and Export Controls). The Eight Worlds paper, also co-authored by Sullivan and Feldman and published in January 2026, is a companion piece; this April 2026 essay is Sullivan's more prescriptive, action-oriented follow-up after leaving government, and the two are presented as compatible (Eight Worlds Framework). The MAIM framework of Hendrycks, Schmidt, and Wang overlaps with Sullivan's deterrence logic but emphasizes competition over cooperation, whereas Sullivan gives more weight to the stability floor and US-China cooperation channels (Superintelligence Strategy (Hendrycks, Schmidt, Wang)). Sullivan's call for ethical AI adoption in military contexts stands in contrast to reporting on actual military use, including a New York Times account of Claude generating thousands of targets with "left click, right click, left click" human involvement (Mutually Automated Destruction: The Escalating Global A.I. Arms Race (NYT)).
Sullivan presents the "nodes of leverage" concept as an account of China's strategy in terms more specific than "catching up," and the "innovation without production leads to knowledge outflow and lost leadership" argument as a mechanism for why US industrial atrophy matters.
Provenance and stance
The essay is treated as Sullivan's position rather than independent evidence. The export-controls defense, the allied-scale call, and the responsible-AI argument are his positions as a Democratic national security figure; the Trump administration's approach is documented separately. It is the most comprehensive US technology-strategy framework from a former senior government official in the collection, bridging the conceptual frameworks (Eight Worlds, MAIM) and an operational blueprint for US policy.
Relationships
- supports: Export Controls (AI) — "small yard, high fence" framework; defends chip controls against "it backfired" critique
- supports: Compute Governance — semiconductors as the central export-control and industrial-policy target
- supports: AI and National Security — comprehensive US natsec framework
- related: Eight Worlds Framework — companion piece from same author; more prescriptive
- related: Jake Sullivan — primary author; update entity page
- related: Dario Amodei — On DeepSeek and Export Controls — compatible export-control position; Sullivan's is broader
- related: Superintelligence Strategy (Hendrycks, Schmidt, Wang) — overlapping deterrence logic; more cooperative emphasis
- related: Mutually Automated Destruction: The Escalating Global A.I. Arms Race (NYT) — real-world contrast with Sullivan's normative framework
- related: Autonomous Weapons — Sullivan's call for responsible military AI adoption
- related: AI and Authoritarianism — "operating system for authoritarianism" framing of Chinese tech exports