She certainly didn’t expect to end the evening vilified as aChinese spy.
Then one exchange turned sour.
The guy looked at Sarah.
Uncomfortable, she excused herself from the conversation.
He posted it to X, where it attracted millions of views.
I was at an AI thing in SF this weekend when a young woman walked up.
read one reply on X.
“She was from Beijing and had a very posh accent,” responded Hammond.
(Sarah is from an entirely different part of China.)
Other partygoers piled onto the speculation.
“I’m glad I wasn’t the only one who thought that,” one said.
Another insisted: “I can’t dismiss the idea that she was CCP…
If there’s a plausible risk, & there is, she shouldn’t be allowed in.”
“Everyoneknows,” she said about the encounter.
“I had to stop going to networking events.
I just wanted this thing to die down.”
It found only a few cases of actual spying.
The China Initiative’s slipshod approach upended many people’s lives.
The Biden administration escalated Trump’s competitive approach toward China.
Last April, Biden signed a bipartisan bill ordering the Chinese companyByteDance to sell TikTokon grounds of national security.
Now, the fear of espionage has shifted to Silicon Valley.
The paper was widely circulated in Silicon Valley and even shared to X by Ivanka Trump.
(OpenAI has said the concerns Aschenbrenner shared with the board were not the reason he was fired.)
The venture capitalist Marc Andreessen entertained a similar thought experiment last March.
“What we see is the security equivalent of swiss cheese.
OpenAI did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
“He told me he worked on a nuclear-related company,” she said.
“He was like, ‘I cannot share anything with you.
Are you looking at my phone?
She also tries to downplay her Chinese accent and cultural identity.
Sarah affirmed this sentiment.
Many Chinese startup founders are also deemphasizing their nationality.
She said another Chinese founder told her: “We work for no government.
We just want to build businesses.”
Several people I spoke with described their situation as a “double bind.”
But these days, eerily similar state and social sanctions are intruding on their work.
In some cases, the tensions are making it difficult for people from China to stay in the US.
On forums for Chinese nationals, anxious students and professionals fret about how to avoid extended processing.
“I work as a machine learning engineer in the Bay Area,” reads one post from October.
“I work on some AI product applications and do no core AI research.
I’m feeling panicked.”
One AI Ph.D. student wrote in November, “I have now waited for more than 130 days.
My school has deferred me for one semester, but I cannot defer it again.”
As tensions ramp up, many Chinese tech workers are reconsidering whether the American dream is worth the risk.
She returned to China in December.
Meanwhile, the US faces a criticaltalent shortage in AI.
China is currently the largest source of these top-tier researchers and more are choosing to stay in China.
“Immigration reform is a national security imperative.”
But Kaushik considers blanket bans on foreign nationals just as counterproductive.
He instead pointed to policies that restrict students from specific Chinese-military-affiliated universities from obtaining visas.
Other experts believe that nationality-based anti-espionage efforts are more security theater than reality.
She thinks the TikTok ban makes the same mistakes.
It’s unclear what stance thisTrump administrationwill take.
Some in Silicon Valley are hopeful that the president-elect will expand the visa program for high-skilled immigrants.
Those who are staying in the US, meanwhile, say they feel exhausted.
It feels like we have this talent that no one wants.”
Jasmine Sunis a writer covering tech, politics, and culture from San Francisco.
