DISPATCHES OF THE SECOND COLD WAR OBSERVATORY
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BIOTECH: THE NEW TECHNONATIONALIST FRONT IN THE SECOND COLD WAR
Jaša Veselinovič
Rupasri Senthil Kumar
Nana de Graaff
10 October 2026
1. Introduction
“China is likely to follow the same playbook with biotechnology as it has with other strategic technologies. First, they steal. Then, they scale. Once they have cornered the market, they strangle.”
This drastic warning appears in the final report of the National Security Commission on Emerging Biotechnology (NSCEB), which calls for an urgent strategic response and a ‘biotech race’ with China. According to the commission, “China is quickly ascending to biotechnology dominance” and the US has limited time to act: “To remain competitive, the United States must take swift action in the next three years. Otherwise, we risk falling behind, a setback from which we may never recover”. The report concludes that as “biotechnology takes centre stage in the unfolding strategic competition”, the US’s “window to act is closing,” requiring a two-track strategy: “make America innovate faster, and slow China down.”
The NSCEB is not a marginal or merely hawkish voice in Washington’s China response. Modelled on the National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence (NSCAI), it brought together bipartisan lawmakers, national security officials, a biotech CEO, and the former Google CEO and tech cold warrior Eric Schmidt. Established in 2022, the Commission represents one of the most prominent and institutionally embedded efforts to make biotech part of the US-China strategic rivalry. Its final report advanced 49 recommendations, chief among them urging the US government to “dedicate a minimum of $15 billion over the next five years to unleash more private capital into our national biotechnology sector”. Many of its recommendations have steadily found their way into legislation under both Biden and the second Trump administration. At the same time, Congress has pursued a range of initiatives through multipronged legislation, whereby everything from investments in Chinese drug developers to manufacturing and clinical research is under increasing scrutiny.
In the US, biotech competition is increasingly likened to the ‘AI race’. Yet the emergence of a “biotech race” is in many ways puzzling. Even as great power competition became the bipartisan common-sense foundation of US global strategy in the early 2020s, biotech and health research were notable exceptions. Biotech was in fact among the last sectors to be drawn into the consuming spiral of great-power competition. The US repeatedly committed to continued cooperation with China on biosecurity, pandemic preparedness, vaccine development, and cancer treatments. In Biden’s first address to the UN General Assembly in September 2021, he stated that “even if we have intense disagreements in other areas [with China],” the US was committed to cooperation on shared challenges like the COVID-19 pandemic. When his Secretary of State Antony Blinken described the US relationship with China as “competitive when it should be, collaborative when it can be, and adversarial when it must be,” biotech research and global health fell within the collaborative bracket. Since its start in the early 2020s, attempts to institutionalize a “biotech race” strategy have also been challenged by a significant part of the US biotech industry, especially biopharma. This oppositional posture (and lobbying efforts) continues as the Western pharmaceutical industry intensifies its integration with the Chinese biotech ecosystem.
Biotech was therefore not an obvious candidate for incorporation within the great-power competition or the emerging architecture of technonationalism. Indeed, significant sections of the US biotech industry, particularly biopharmaceutical firms, opposed this strategy promoted by the emerging fusion of big tech capital and the US national-security state. Still, a diverse coalition has been pushing in the direction of making it a front in the Second Cold War. Here, elite circles of US policymaking carried out the central ideological work by developing the narrative of a ‘biotech race’ with China, bred in the dense network of think tanks and advisory committees like the NSCEB.
The work of NSCEB and the body of arguments for which it was the main institutional(ising) motor is an ongoing attempt to subordinate US public and private biotech strategies to competing with and undermining China’s biotech advances. In attempting to make ever larger swaths of the US biotech industry (trade, investment, workforce, etc.) part of the “small yard, high fence” strategy, this effort is one dimension of attempts at tech decoupling and the consolidation of US technonationalism.
NSCAI's work served as an important precursor in two respects. Firstly, as Daniel Mügge and colleagues have argued, the NSCAI’s idea of an AI race provided the anti-China “discursive marriage of economic competitiveness with the geopolitically-motivated drive for digital sovereignty”. This fusion also constituted the discursive bedrock for the NSCEB. The “AI race” strategy’s successful institutionalisation across Washington elite networks created the common-sense basis for expanding that logic into a similar zero-sum “biotech race” with China, which began with the AI-biotech nexus but soon enveloped biotech as a whole. Second, NSCEB mirrored NSCAI as a policymaking format that brought together a bipartisan collection of policymakers, the national security apparatus, and tech leaders. Notably, in both, former Google CEO Eric Schmidt played a central role, complementing his policy work with extensive funding for scientific research, venture capital investments in startups, and support for accompanying think tank infrastructure and public advocacy.
The broader “biotech race” milieu is constituted by a network of organizations that produce reports, congressional testimony, and policy recommendations, creating the appearance of a coherent field of technocratic expertise. Most notable are the Center for Security and Emerging Technology (CSET) and Special Competitive Studies Project (SCSP). Through their publications, and public interventions, these organisations and their opinion leaders redefine the promise and dangers of biotechnology, securitise Chinese biotech development and US firm engagement with Chinese counterparts, and advance policy measures aimed at selectively decoupling the two biotech ecosystems. The success of this project, however, has been limited, for now at least.
2. Think tanks in US foreign policy
To shine a light on ongoing attempts to make biotech part of a “race,” we first have to understand the function of US think tanks in (foreign) policy-making. The nexus of philanthropic foundations and think tanks that devise and advocate for public policy measures is a significant actor in US politics and foreign policy more specifically. However, rather than relatively benign public service bodies engaged in a pluralist “marketplace of ideas”, think tanks constitute a pillar of elite power networks. Think tanks are not only sources of independent policy advice, but also part of wider corporate and political elite networks. US foreign policy-planning networks overlap extensively with the corporate world, not only in funding but also through overlapping or alternating professional affiliations and ‘revolving doors’. This position of think tanks in the Washington policymaking world and the corporate world was skilfully relied on and leveraged by both NSCAI and NSCEB, and by promoters of ‘biotech race’ arguments that emerged in those circles, with Eric Schmidt as a case in point.
The growing prominence of geoeconomics amid the intensifying US-China technonationalist rivalry is throwing preceding political and economic strategies and the socio-political coalitions underpinning them into disarray. This crisis presents an opening; it is simultaneously a moment of destruction and reconstruction, when other ways of seeing and organizing the world, other arguments about the ‘national interest’ emerge, are realigned around emerging capitalist formations, and are contested. A crisis then gives think tanks and other “permanent persuaders”, as Gramsci called them, a powerful opportunity and space to act; synthesising, constructing and articulating strategies which co-produce the understandings of the said crisis by charting ways out of it.
While providing ideational, normative and strategic direction is key to these efforts, the role of think tanks goes well beyond formulating and promoting certain policy ideas. It is accompanied by coalitional politics and institution-building within the US policy-planning networks, pursued in sync with the underlying interests and dynamics of capital accumulation. This process is particularly fraught as US foreign (geo)economic policy is currently in a moment of reconstruction. Starting with Trump 1.0, there was a definitive break with the preceding long continuity of commitment to neoliberal globalization and a shift toward great power competition. However, the precise contours of this battle in terms of terrains and goals remain very much contested, as is most acutely exhibited in the ongoing struggles over the precise form and content of the US technonationalist strategy towards China. Unsurprisingly, many of these struggles have played out in and through the US policy-planning networks and think tanks.
3. The life-and-death issue of defeating China in an “AI race”
Three days before leaving office in January 2025, Jake Sullivan, National Security Adviser to US President Joe Biden, issued a warning: “[the] next few years will determine whether artificial intelligence leads to catastrophe – and whether China or America prevails in the AI arms race”. Achieving US victory will require closer collaboration with leading US AI firms, a “new model of relationship because of just the sheer capability in the hands of a private actor”. While starkly worded, Sullivan’s invocation of an existential and potentially catastrophic AI arms race is by now eerily familiar. Over the preceding years, AI has been transformed from a domain of technological and commercial competition into a central terrain of US-China strategic rivalry, and a proxy for the broader balance of power. Victory in this competition was increasingly imagined as conferring unheard-of economic gains, industrial transformation, and an insurmountable boost to war-fighting capacity.
While this view has attained common-sense status among US policymakers, the idea of an AI arms race with China was far from predestined. As the AI Now Institute has shown, it “evolved from a sporadic talking point to an increasingly institutionalized position, represented by collaborative initiatives between government, military, and tech-industry actors and reinforced by legislation and regulatory debates”. The “AI arms race” narrative positions AI – and an ever-growing array of technologies, including biotech, as we will see below – not merely as a commercial product where US firms might engage in commercial competition with Chinese peers, but as a strategic national security asset that the US government must comprehensively protect and promote – together of course, with the AI firms that own and produce it.
3.1. Eric Schmidt’s realization
When it comes to consolidating longer-brewing US-China tensions into competition over AI (and gradually other high-tech domains), Eric Schmidt, who served as Google’s CEO and executive chairman between 2011 and 2015, has arguably been the most powerful and influential proponent and public advocate. Henry Farrell, has described Schmidt as “the most influential American foreign policy thinker of the early 21st century”, arguing that he has “reshaped America’s understanding of national security” by (almost) seamlessly aligning it with the success of US AI firms. Schmidt’s influence rests on his position at the intersections of defense, tech, policy, and public opinion-making networks. His extensive embeddedness, as Elisabeth Siegel argues, “enabled him to take on the role of a “translator” of how to view the rise of AI and what to do about it within national security realms”.
As Siegel shows, the origins of Schmidt’s campaign can be precisely dated. Before 2017, Schmidt had rarely discussed China at any length or treated Chinese technological development as a central concern. That changed with his keynote address at the Center for a New American Security’s AI and Global Security Summit in November 2017. After reading China’s AI strategy, he, in his own telling, came to a stark realisation about the trajectory of Chinese AI development and ambitions: “By 2020 they will have caught up. By 2025 they will be better than us, and by 2030 they will dominate the industries of AI”. By his own account, the realization was accompanied by an equally pointed assessment of the US: “the ones in charge of AI dominance here in our country? Weren’t we the ones who invented this stuff?” In his telling, the US lacked any national strategy, leading him to deride present members of the policy-planning elite to “get our act together”. Schmidt likened his wake-up call to a contemporary “Sputnik moment”, a point at which the federal government and private industry would jointly recognize that a technology had become significant enough to require priority national attention. AI dominance, Chinese threat, the Cold War Sputnik parallel, and the necessary symbiosis between the US state and AI firms – all of the elements of the AI race narrative have been there from the beginning in embryonic form.
3.2. NSCAI
Soon enough, in April 2018, the cry to “get our act together” bore fruit. The January 2018 National Defense Strategy of the first Trump Administration formalized the status of China as a strategic competitor and drew attention to the fact that “many technological developments will come from the commercial sector [which] means that state competitors and non-state actors will also have access to them, a fact that risks eroding the conventional overmatch to which our Nation has grown accustomed”. Even more importantly, in August 2018, the National Security Commission on AI (NSCAI) was established with Eric Schmidt appointed its chair.
Beyond Schmidt, members included Andrew Moore, Google’s head of cloud AI; Amazon CEO Andy Jassy; Safra Catz, co-CEO of Oracle; Eric Horvitz, Microsoft’s director of research; Robert Work, a former deputy secretary of defense who helped start the Pentagon’s pivot toward AI, and former Democratic FCC commissioner Mignon Clyburn. Schmidt explained the purpose of NSCAI rather prosaically; it would help the US “harness this transformative technology to benefit both our economic and national security interests”.
Over the next two years, the NSCAI issued several interim reports and recommendations; its employees often testified before various government bodies and drove the conversation around the AI competition. The fever pitch peaked with the publication of NSCAI’s final report in March 2021, which cemented a specific vision of AI as a critical national security asset that is both the subject and the tool of competition with China. As Schmidt and his Vice Chair Robert Work (former deputy secretary of defense under Obama and Trump) put it in the foreword:
“AI is part of a broader global technology competition. Competition will speed up innovation. We should race together with partners when AI competition is directed at the moonshots that benefit humanity like discovering vaccines. But we must win the AI competition that is intensifying strategic competition with China.”
The report went on to warn that “for the first time since World War II, America’s technological predominance — the backbone of its economic and military power — is under threat. China possesses the might, talent, and ambition to surpass the United States as the world’s leader in AI in the next decade if current trends do not change”. Faced with this urgent threat, NSCAI advocated for increased defence funding for AI R&D up to $32 billion a year by 2026; the growth of computer science talent in the public sector; and the prioritization of AI within the DoD. The 756-page report also came with pre-drafted legislation so lawmakers could copy and paste the group’s ideas into law and draft executive orders for the White House. And indeed, NSCAI was very successful in embedding AI at the centre of an emerging China-hawkish consensus in Washington.
3.3. Complementary strategies of influence
The success of NSCAI and Eric Schmidt in making the AI race with China into US policy and elite common sense was flanked by complementary efforts. Since 2020, Schmidt has been publishing op-eds in The Wall Street Journal and Foreign Affairs. He also co-authored two popular books with Henry Kissinger containing musings about the future of humanity and AI. Through his ‘philanthropic’ venture fund, Schmidt Futures, he funded salaries of more than two dozen officials in the Biden administration, channelling the money through a non-profit, the Federation of American Scientists. At the same time, Schmidt continued his venture capital investments in the AI and defense tech startup ecosystem, bolstering and supporting firms well placed to benefit from NSCAI’s recommendation to the US government to invest $40 billion in (private) AI research and development. Relatedly, Schmidt leveraged his position at the crossroads of tech and defense to argue for the necessity of closer integration between the Pentagon and Silicon Valley. The NSCAI then worked in parallel with and catalysed the emergent fusion between Big Tech and the national security state.
3.3.1. CSET
In its work, NSCAI relied heavily on the analytical capacities of a newcomer think tank – the Center for Security and Emerging Technology (CSET) at Georgetown University. CSET was established in 2019 through a generous grant by Open Philanthropy as the philanthropic arm of the ‘effective altruism’ movement. With lavish funding, CSET positioned itself as a data-driven bedrock of AI debates in the US. It translated and made available over 100 Chinese policy documents and published several data-heavy reports on high-skilled immigration, semiconductor export controls, military-civil fusion, and the government’s role in managing AI impacts. This research underpinned NSCAI’s recommendations with respect to, among other things, targeted export controls on lithography equipment (i.e., AMSL) and the harm immigration restrictions would do to the US AI competitiveness (i.e.. the importance of retaining Chinese AI PhDs).
3.3.2. SCSP
Following the publication of NSCAI’s final report, its congressional mandate expired, and the Commission was formally wound down in March 2021. Its infrastructure, however, was preserved through the Special Competitive Studies Project (SCSP), a new think tank that Schmidt announced just four days after NSCAI’s closure. Ylli Bajraktari, NSCAI’s former executive director, became SCSP’s CEO. Robert Work also joined the board together with more than a dozen staffers from the federal NSCAI commission who followed Schmidt to the SCSP to “carry forward the mission and work of the [NSCAI]”.
While SCSP is the torchbearer for NSCAI’s approach to AI and its modus operandi, it also extends the competitive, zero-sum logic of the AI race to other high-tech domains. In fact, SCSP created ‘panels’ to research the impact of AI and other emerging technologies, in areas that include defence, intelligence, economy, and society, as well as biotech. Riding the wave of bipartisan support for government intervention in technology, exemplified by the CHIPS Act, SCSP, in its first year, released a series of reports calling for the government to fund areas critical to US growth and competitiveness, including nuclear fusion, quantum computing and communications, and gene editing. Biotech was, at this point, becoming part of the all-subsuming logic of technonationalist competition emanating from NSCAI and gradually enveloping additional tech domains.
This reconstruction of the policy-planning machinery and dynamics through which the AI race with China emerged became increasingly is not meant to be exhaustive. It nevertheless illuminates the mechanisms and networks through which this strategy gestated and was propagated. For the story of biotech, understanding this terrain and how the AI debate set its coordinates is crucial. The argument that biotech ought to become a new front in US-China competition emerged from, and was in part shaped by, the same set of actors discussed above, and it piggybacked on the “high tech race with China” arguments that debates on AI made common sense in US elite circles.
4. The making of the “Biotech Race”
Even as the great power competition and technonationalism were taking over as the dominant frame for understanding the present and future of US-China relations, biotech for a long time remained a sort of exception. Amid the last residues of liberal imagination of global commons and working together for the greater good of humanity, biotech was often invoked as the one area where, despite the spiralling rivalrous dynamics, the US and China would continue to cooperate. COVID-19 initially reinforced this biotech exceptionalism, but the pandemic-induced supply chain disruptions soon accelerated and broadened the remit of US-China rivalry.
The prologue to the NSCAI final report penned by Schmidt and Work in March 2021 stated that while the US “must win the AI competition that is intensifying strategic competition with China”, we should nevertheless “race together” in matters “that benefit humanity like discovering vaccines”. Similarly, in the book Schmidt coauthored with Kissinger that same year, biotech is presented as one area for a potential cooperative application of AI for the common benefit of developing new antibiotics or understanding protein folding.
At this point, biotech was treated as a promising area for applying AI models. Schmidt, however, soon struck a more threatening tone. Rather than celebrating AI’s capacity to discover new drugs, Schmidt presented AI as transforming intelligence and statecraft and as a tool for biological warfare. Schmidt’s public interventions from 2022 onwards presented biotech not only as a concrete use case for AI models but also as a high-tech arena of competition with China. A widely read Foreign Affairs article coauthored with Bajraktari and reading like a prospectus for SCSP, sounded the alarm that the US can in fact lose the tech competition with China. To prevent this scenario, they said, Washington needs a plan bringing together “together commercial, academic, and government sectors to carry out a techno-industrial strategy”, revamping “the instruments of U.S. statecraft, including the military, to weather a prolonged period of danger”. This would allow the US domination over “tech battlegrounds” and prevent Beijing from gaining an advantage “in the next round of emerging technologies, which will extend beyond the digital domain to include biotechnology, smart manufacturing, and new methods for producing and storing energy.” As this quote illuminates, rather than just a subcategory/application of the ‘digital domain’, biotech was now itself considered a tech battleground to be won.
In institutionalising this approach, Schmidt and those aligned with his emerging view again deployed the multipronged approach analysed above to shape the “AI race”. Schmidt’s hands-on interest in biotech began in 2021. That’s when Schmidt and his wife Wendy gifted $150 million to the Massachusetts-based Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard to establish a “new era of biology” and build a center to combine data and life sciences as well as merge academia with industry’s efforts. Besides steering more basic science, Schmidt also invested heavily in biotech startups. While some investments go further back to when he promoted the idea of ‘super evolution’, his biotech investments began in earnest in 2021. It was then that Schmidt co-founded First Spark Ventures, whose investments are heavily concentrated in biotech. The next year, Schmidt also co-founded America’s Frontier Fund (AFF) with Peter Thiel and others, which aims to boost technologies that will solidify America’s geopolitical position economically and militarily, with biotech as a major focus. Schmidt also co-founded Hologen, a medical AI startup to build "large medicine models". Schmidt’s branching out into biotech is significant because it forms one leg of the effort to boost biotech domestically while also securitising it as a matter of existential competition with China. Institutionalising this approach reached its pinnacle in the work of NSCEB.
Returning to the 2022 establishment of the NSCEB, it was initially chaired by Jason Kelly, the co-founder and CEO of Ginkgo Bioworks, a Boston-based synthetic biology company, whom the Senate and House Armed Services Committees selected alongside 11 other Commissioners, including Schmidt. Over the next three years, NSCEB drew on over 1800 stakeholder consultations, site visits across the US, and discussions with government and tech leaders at home and abroad. Rather than expiring when the final report was published like NSCAI (and therefore ‘necessitating’ SCSP), NSCEB continued to exist for a year and a half after the report’s release (that is, until November 2026) to keep pushing for implementation of its recommendations. While NSCEB represents the end-product articulation of making biotech a tech battlefield with China, it was part of a constellation of actors and organization cementing this position, including CSET and SCSP.
4.1. The (R)evolution of “Biotechnology”
Generally, the pre-2020 biotech-related policy debates revolved around biosafety, biosecurity, and global goods and all had a globalist flavour. Questions pertained to ensuring equitable access to biotechnologies and a just sharing of their (economic) benefits with debates often focusing on the hierarchies and exploitation enforced through intellectual property rights and GMOs. Biosafety (preventing accidental harm) and biosecurity (preventing intentional misuse) were discussed in terms of (un)suitability of global governance frameworks and the necessity of updating the 1975 Biological Weapons Convention. The biosecurity debate contained a strongly securitised strain, but one that was relatively narrow in scope, focusing on preventing ‘rogue actors’ from getting their hands on potentially dangerous biological weapons. In the US, the body pushing the envelope on this topic was the Bipartisan Commission on Biodefense, a privately funded Atlantic Council project bringing together since 2014 former high-ranking policymakers advocating for strengthened biodefense against large-scale biological events – naturally occurring, accidentally released, or intentionally introduced.
The think tanks we focus on here, however, developed and advocated a new perspective that, from the get-go, approached biotech more comprehensively. As Schmidt wrote in Time magazine, the “next big game-changing revolution is in biology”, where we are now “on the verge of a “ChatGPT moment” in biology, with significant technological innovation and widespread adoption on the horizon. This take on biotechnology’s omnipotence came with an inherent national-security-infused understanding.
Even before CSET started working on biotech, then-director Dewey Murdick, when asked on a 2021 podcast which policy areas deserved a $50 million blank check to merge the questions of tech and national security, singled out biotech. CSET’s subsequent publications expanded on this conceptualization. In 2022, CSET research fellow Caroline Schuerger testified before the Bipartisan Commission on Biodefense, delineating the intensifying potential risks to national security posed by biotech such as the misuse of gain-of-function (GoF) and dual-use research, but also going beyond these traditional biosecurity concerns, highlighting the significance of developing a “bioeconomy” for US economic growth and competitiveness.
Increasingly, biotechnology was becoming not only a matter of preventing the misuse of possibilities afforded by rapid scientific progress, but a product of the entire US innovation ecosystem with central significance for its economic security and competitiveness. Attention began to shift towards the significance – especially in comparison with China – of domestic talent pipelines, research laboratories and industrial infrastructure supporting national innovation ecosystems. CSET also began highlighting the convergence of AI and biotechnology, not least through a data-heavy approach to mapping (the growing) Chinese capacities. Recognising AI’s capacity to accelerate drug discovery and biological research, they framed synthetic biology and CRISPR technologies as strategic beyond healthcare for medicine, industry, and agriculture.
SCSP was again the first to pull these threads together and started talking about biotechnology in terms of a race with China, subsuming biotech under competition with China as the “organizing principle” of its work. Technological leadership in biotech was, together with compute, networks, energy storage/generation (and their convergence), declared one of the five general-purpose technologies that will by 2030 determine global leadership. From SCSP’s perspective, it was therefore crucial that the US adopt a “techno-industrial strategy” to ensure this position is (or continues to be) occupied by the US and its “government-private sector nexus” rather than China. For biotechnology, this meant adopting the semiconductor and AI playbook, by for example, using CFIUS to “screen, mitigate, and restrict the further expansion of PRC biotechnology firms” in the US.
By the time NSCEB began its work in earnest in late 2022, SCSP and CSET had converged on incorporating questions of industrial capacity and manufacturing resilience into the problem definition of biotechnology. COVID-19 was used to support the argument that investing in scientific knowledge alone was insufficient for leadership in biotechnology. By showing how global interdependence generates supply-chain vulnerabilities, the pandemic for CSET proved that maintaining biotech strategic advantage over China depends on assertive industrial policy intervention to bolster manufacturing capability, biomanufacturing infrastructure, and resilient supply chains.
The emphasis on competitiveness went hand in hand with the conceptual expansion of the dual-use concerns, which have historically been at the centre of biosecurity debates. Just as biotech’s status as a general-purpose technology supported its strategic centrality in economic terms, it also stretched dual-use concerns (especially when paired with AI) and the accompanying linkage to national security. CSET, for example, highlighted the application of Large Language Models (LLMs) in biological research, which not only aids the discovery of new therapies, but could help manufacture new bioweapons.
In line with its emphasis on the general-purpose nature of biotech, SCSP also applied a more ‘general purpose’ dual-use perspective, warning of its capacity to reshape economic productivity, military capabilities, and overall geopolitical power. The emphasis on the mutually reinforcing relationship between biotech and AI also added a 'strategic' twist to preexisting privacy-centred biosecurity debates about biological data. Biological data and related concerns about ownership, privacy, and control were now framed as matters of strategic vulnerability and effective security-conscious governance. As Schmidt himself vividly warned, “leaving our [US American] genetic information in the hands of our adversaries could potentially aid them in developing a bioweapon used to target a specific genetic profile.”
By 2025, SCSP and CSET developed a comprehensive set of arguments that thoroughly redefined the significance of biotechnology and also came to underpin NSCEB. Rather than a matter of scientific discovery and (potentially collaborative) innovation, this influential corner of policy debate positioned biotech as a foundational, general-purpose technology that will underpin national economic and military power and shape the future geopolitical competition. As such, it merited generous public support through investment in biotech commercialization, industrial scaling, production capacity, and reduced reliance on foreign suppliers, achieved through the state’s fusion with private sector innovation. Across both CSET and SCSP publications, biotech was made into another front in the era-defining tech race with China. Besides mirroring NSCAI in organizational and policy entrepreneurship terms, CSET and SCSP’s argumentation in favour of the biotech race also piggybacked on the increasingly widespread adherence to the “AI race” strategic reasoning. Biotech was not only its own general-purpose technology but, as the argument went, the two technologies were also undergoing a convergence through a mutually reinforcing use of AI in biotech.
4.2. The “China Threat” and the Future of US Biotechnology
The ever-growing strategic significance ascribed to biotech also meant a shift in how much of a competitor (and how threatening) China was perceived. Here, the shifting definition of biotech for US competitiveness and national security was articulated in interaction with the broader debates (and the hawkish positioning of both CSET and SCSP) regarding China’s technological advancements.
In its work on biotech, CSET built on extensive previous work on China’s innovation ecosystem and links between universities, the People’s Liberation Army (PLA), and economic actors in strategic areas such as cybersecurity. Emphasizing the efficacy of China’s innovation system, China was framed as a major strategic competitor seeking to transform itself into a biotech superpower through long-term state planning, including the integration of universities, state laboratories, and private companies through extensive state funding and administrative support, blurring the lines between civilian innovation and military capability. While CSET’s ‘data-driven’ approach often adopted a more detached approach to mapping Chinese (bio)tech capacities, it is underpinned by an overall framework of strategic competition; the Chinese capacities must be reliably measured and understood for the US to benchmark and calibrate its efforts.
Eric Schmidt’s SCSP, on the other hand, was completely straightforward about what should be the place of China in the future of (US) biotech: decoupled or at the very least completely subdued. Since its start, SCSP was less focused on the indigenous capacities and institutional specificities of the Chinese biotech ecosystem mapped by CSET and instead ascribed a significant part of the success of Chinese biotech to “a strong uptick in PRC M&A activity in the U.S. biotechnology sector over the past few years.” They presented this as an “aggressive effort” to dislodge the US from the position at the “technological frontier”, justifying strict export controls on the US biotech industry, echoing technonationalist measures taken in the ongoing US-China chip war.
Since both the necessity and reality of existential competition with China were the founding assumption of SCSP, calling for a ‘race’ approach to biotech and other foundational technologies was no surprise. Throughout the years, however, the imperative of taking on China was made in increasingly urgent terms and the US-China relationship quickly became zero-sum. Prophesying biotech’s own imminent ‘ChatGPT moment’, Schmidt warned that it is “paramount to ensure that it will happen on our shores”. Amid broader concerns about the commercialization and adoption of biotech and other foundational tech advancements, CSET also moved towards critically assessing not only China’s innovation ecosystem but also biotech’s political economy more broadly. They focused on China’s bioeconomy, which fosters national biomedical “champions” such as BGI and the blurred state-private boundaries that indicate China’s biotech imbrication with the CCP. From SCSP’s perspective, this meant that despite the US’s continued lead in biotech innovation, the fact that the battle was just as much fought on the terrain of adoption and commercialization meant China may have some advantages. SCSP therefore continued to contrast China’s leveraging of state investments, industrial policy, and manufacturing and supply chains, with US dependencies on international production networks, framing it as a major vulnerability threatening long-term technological leadership.
For SCSP, then, China was a “persistent threat” and “the most formidable competitor the United States has ever faced”. In biotech, this was reflected not necessarily in basic science and innovation, where the US was still in the lead, but in commercialisation, which gradually became the focus for both CSET and SCSP. Here, SCSP in particular, came to portray China as effectively leading in commercialisation, manufacturing capacity, infrastructure investment, and supply-chain control, calling for major investments into the US biotech sector.
4.3. Moving Forward: US Policy Recommendations
The policy recommendations CSET and SCSP formulated for the US government reflected a shifting assessment of the Chinese threat, moving from a narrower set of measures to an ‘all guns blazing’ approach. From the beginning, however, both CSET and SCSP focused on reorganizing the US for sustained technological competition rather than simply countering China. Initially, that primarily meant strengthening the innovation ecosystem domestically, including investments in scientific talent, universities, and public-private coordination. CSET also recommended that the US and its allies form a common agenda for governing AI and genomic data in biotechnology. Out of parallel concern for IP and knowledge leakage, SCSP also proposed protectionist mechanisms such as outbound investment screenings and modernized export controls.
Gradually, however, these policy recommendations expanded beyond strengthening the US innovation system towards constructing a comprehensive national biotechnology strategy. In line with the general-purpose technology character ascribed to biotech, SCSP argued that this strategic issue required coordinated government and industry action to secure long-term competitiveness. In its 2023 National Action Plan, the SCSP called for a whole-of-nation approach, advocating public-private collaboration, government investments, and biotechnology “moonshots” to accelerate research and commercialization. Defining the state-capital fusion as a matter of US national interest and the only way to defeat China in the manifold tech races is absolutely central to SCSP and Schmidt’s vision. As Schmidt summarized the issue in 2022, justifying the need for his AFF VC fund, “As all of our national security commissions have shown, government, industry, academia and philanthropy must work together if we want free and open societies to lead this next wave of innovation for the benefit of all”. Especially as the focus shifted towards commercialization as the one element where China is ahead and that the US should compete in to win, the private-public fusion in ensuring the “ability to execute and commercialize new inventions at scale” became increasingly central.
The necessary slew of public and publicly derisked private investment needed in the US for reducing strategic vulnerabilities should be used to encourage the expansion of domestic biomanufacturing capacity, embedding redundancy into vaccine supply chains, and early investment in scientific infrastructure, labs, and talent, to generate first mover advantages. This included targeted investment in the algorithms, data, and computing infrastructure needed for large language models in biology.
Furthermore, SCSP proposed to establish a major national biotechnology program or “moonshot” and use sustained government support for biological data, technological platforms, research infrastructure, and the broader commercialization ecosystem for the US, together with allies, to “create the infrastructure for the bioeconomy”. When working with international allies, Scmidt’s focus here was not primarily on shared benefit, but on securing “a reliable supply chain domestically and internationally that covers everything from raw material extraction to data storage while we build the necessary talent pipeline”, as reliance on “ on other countries for key components in biotechnology presents enormous economic and national security risks”. As ever, the target was China, with SCSP’s memo to incoming President Trump setting the scene by claiming that “the world has been painted red as PRC influence has taken hold across global supply chain networks, production lines, and consumer markets”. To provide this project of tech competition and domination over China with solid institutional backing and continuity, SCSP proposed a White House Technology Competitiveness Council comprising government, academic, and industry experts to identify technology gaps, prioritize investment, and execute national technology strategy.
5. Conclusion
Biotech has become the latest front in US-China (and by extension global) tech rivalry. We have retraced the institutional manoeuvring and arguments of the most articulated and consistently hawkish section of the US policy planning elite in favour of subsuming biotech under the spiralling logic of US-China rivalry through the strategy of pursuing a ‘biotech race’. Here, NSCAI served as both an ideological precursor and a model for this endeavour. We reconstructed arguments behind the ‘biotech race’ proposal through the work of CSET and SCSP, the two organisations with a central role (or even origins) in the work and worldview of both NSCAI and NSCEB. In their work, they redefined the significance of biotechnology from a (potentially cooperative) basic science issue into a strategic high-tech sector that the US has to ‘win’ to maintain its economic and geopolitical dominance. This was accompanied by a thorough analysis of (growing) Chinese biotech capabilities, presented as a powerful economic challenge and a multiplier of China’s military might. These two arguments carry far-reaching policy implications, with the ‘biotech race’ strategy requiring significant public investment to derisk private (venture capital) investment, industrial policy for biotech infrastructure, and comprehensive foreign economic policy to undermine Chinese biotech advances and reduce US dependencies on its biotech ecosystem.
Indeed, the ‘biotech race’ line of argument closely aligned with the assumptions and arguments of the NSCEB’s final report. In fact, in April 2025, the document was launched at an event co-organised by SCSP. As Todd Young, the current NSCEB Chair explained the purpose of NSCEB: “What we needed was a plan. We are not usually very comfortable with making plans when it comes to economic priorities. But this is a national security priority; it is a dual-use challenge we face, and historically we have planned around national security priorities”. The argumentative and data firepower assembled by SCSP and CSET in favour of pursuing the biotech race laid the ground for such a plan. It presented and advocated for a coherent story securitising biotech and made it plannable as something to be pursued by the public-private fusion in the name of national security.
However – and notwithstanding significant legislative uptake of NSCEB’s mentioned in the Introduction – the ‘biotech race’ strategy remains much more contested than its AI forerunner. The strongest pushback comes from the pharmaceutical industry, not so much over calls for public derisking of investments in the domestic biotech ecosystem (for obvious reasons), but over the effective decoupling from China that the ‘biotech race’ calls for. In 2024 and 2025, the focal point of these conflicts was the Biosecure Act that would, in its original formulation, effectively prohibit US firms from contracting with specific Chinese firms, including BGI and WuXi AppTec, a large Chinese biotech contractor, which the NSCEB final report ominously deemed to be the “Huawei equivalent in biotechnology” and which is often the go-to outsourcing firm for intermediate steps in drug development for US Big Pharma. The latter’s lobbying stalled and eventually watered down the bill, which passed in December 2025 in a much milder form.
Alongside the resistance from Big Pharma, the ‘biotech race’ strategy also had fierce supporters among US biotech capital, as well as in the ranks of the broader tech contingent of the capitalist class (as exemplified by Schmidt). Chief among them has been Ginkgo Bioworks, a US biotech firm, which has been arguing that the US must respond to China’s “all-of-nation” strategy with bold public investment in AI, biomanufacturing, and biological intelligence capabilities to avoid strategic dependence. In fact, the firm has been instrumental in NSCEB, with its founder Jason Kelly acting as NSCEB’s original Chairman. The firm has a clear interest in lessening the US dependence on Chinese biotech research services since one of Ginkgo’s products is the automation of biotech labs, a more costly alternative to pharma’s outsourcing to WuXi AppTec. To this day, the US biotech’s “China question” remains open and openly fought over, with Kelly one of its most vocal protagonists. On the one hand, the advocacy for the biotech race strategy definitively put biotech on the map of US-China and, more broadly, global tech competition. On the other hand, even in the US, framing biotech as a race and moving toward decoupling from China remains highly contested. The ‘making of’ the biotech race therefore remains only one part, if a very influential one, of a (still developing) story.
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Jaša Veselinovič is a postdoctoral researcher at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, working on geopolitical drivers of the EU’s attempts at technological derisking and decoupling from China. His research interests include critical international political economy, geopolitics and geoeconomics, US foreign policy, think tanks, and the EU.
Rupasri Senthil Kumar is a research assistant in the ReGlobe Group at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, where they have built a research database of US think tank publications examining the relationship between biotechnology and US-China relations.
Nana de Graaff is a Professor of Global Politics and Networks at the Department of Political Science and Public Administration at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. She leads ReGlobe, a research group on globalization and emergent decoupling, and is the principal investigator of a research project on the Geopolitics of Europe-China Technological Decoupling, funded by the Dutch Research Council (NWO).
The opinions expressed herein are those of the authors; they do not necessarily reflect the views of the SCWO.