China Labels US “Surveillance Empire”

Well, that is certainly the pot calling the kettle black. Wow. This comes from the US’s plan to put asset tracking tags in GPUs to cut down on black market sales to China.

“While accusing others of spying, Washington runs the world’s most sprawling intelligence apparatus. Steeped in Cold War paranoia, some American politicians see trade not as a channel for mutual exchange, but as another theater for covert operations,” state-run outlet Xinhua wrote in a comment last week.

https://www.theregister.com/2025/08/18/china_gpu_tracking

Both countries have a long history of surveillance and intelligence using tech as the vehicle. Some politicians want to add location tracking to American chips, even though there is no obvious way to do this. They want to try and keep high end chips out of China.

China, which is no fan of privacy or limited government, thinks that the US government putting tracking tags on high value servers is a bridge too far. Here is what they said:

“In the Hollywood blockbuster The Matrix, machines lulled humans into believing that they were free while secretly monitoring their every thought,” the publication wrote. “Washington’s blatant demand for embedding security controls in US AI chips is the real-world sequel: the facade is free trade, but surveillance is built in.”

https://www.theregister.com/2025/08/18/china_gpu_tracking

Does this mean that China is worried that the US might embed a kill switch in these systems? That could explain why the Chinese government is telling their companies not to use US chips. It also could explain why China bought $30+ billion of chip making equipment and software last month, ahead of this announcement.

Does that purchase mean that the Chinese government, while complaining about US surveillance and intelligence gathering, was spying on us and knew this was coming? When the US gave the green light to resume shipping chips to China, Beijing said they were concerned about tracking tech, backdoors and kill switches.

China is definitely behind us in developing and manufacturing high end chips, but a tech war could be just what they need to close that gap. If they close it, then we really don’t have a way to stop them.

As I said previously, the relationship between the US and China is like a game of 3D chess. It is unclear how it will end, but it is far from over. Stay tuned. Credit: The Register

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