Biden Administration Proposes Ban on Chinese Software in Vehicles

The Biden administration announced a sweeping initiative on Monday to ban Chinese-developed software from internet-connected cars in the United States, justifying the move on national security grounds. The action is intended to prevent Chinese intelligence agencies from monitoring the movements of Americans or using the vehicles’ electronics as a pathway into the U.S. electric grid or other critical infrastructure.

The move, most likely the last major cutoff of Chinese products into the United States under the Biden administration, follows the same logic that resulted in the ban on Huawei telecommunications equipment and the investigations into Chinese-made cranes operating at American ports.

Combined with the effort by Congress to force TikTok to cut its ties with its Chinese owners, the initiative is a major addition to the administration’s efforts to seal off what it views as major cybervulnerabilities for the United States. But the effort has, in effect, begun to drop a digital iron curtain between the world’s two largest economies, which only two decades ago were declaring that the internet would bind them together.

Briefing reporters, administration officials said that national security concerns, not politics, drove the Commerce Department to propose the ban, which officials said would probably be made a permanent rule before President Biden leaves office on Jan. 20. This year, Mr. Biden announced 100 percent tariffs on Chinese electric vehicles, saying they were wildly subsidized in China. The announcement was notable because such cars had barely begun to enter the U.S. market — and Mr. Biden explicitly cast it as a way of keeping jobs in America.

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