National Security in U.S. Antitrust Enforcement: Toward a More Disciplined Framework

As great-power competition between the United States and China intensifies in strategically vital sectors such as artificial intelligence and quantum computing, both countries’ antitrust regimes increasingly address national security considerations, but in starkly different ways. China’s recent enforcement actions against Nvidia, Google, and Qualcomm reveal a pattern consistent with decades of state-directed mercantilist trade policy: antitrust deployed as leverage in a campaign for technolo