The US-China Economic and Security Review Commission urged Washington to treat data as an economic asset and develop a national strategy to prevent China from setting lasting global data standards.
The commission’s report noted that Beijing designated data as a production factor in 2020 and has built thousands of data exchanges and pilot programmes to commercialise and share data between public and private actors.
“Standards are difficult to revise once adopted,” the report said.
The panel argued that China’s coordinated, top-down push is creating market infrastructure, valuation, analytics and financing services, that gives Chinese firms an advantage in sectors where operational data matters most, notably AI and robotics, and that privately held corporate data is becoming increasingly valuable as web sources are exhausted.
The report pointed to US firms’ scramble for training material, including physical books bought at scale, and warned that US companies seeking to engage China’s market face a strict data regime that leaves them “in the dark” about national-security boundaries.
The commission, established by Congress in 2000, framed the recommendation as urgent: engage now on standards rather than try to unwind them later.
