Forced labor—work performed involuntarily and under menace of penalty—occurs globally, with reports of abuses in all countries. About 28 million people—one in every 300 people worldwide—work against their will, bound through physical violence, threats, debt bondage, and other exploitative means. The United States has long imposed prohibitions on imports of goods made with forced labor—notably, under the Tariff Act of 1930 and the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act of 2021 (UFLPA). The UFLPA targets China's extensive use of forced labor as a state-sponsored, coercive policy tool in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR), by barring U.S. imports of goods made in the XUAR or sourced from entities connected to it. Still, such goods flow through global supply chains. In 2021, the United States accounted for over one-fifth of the world's imports of goods that were at risk of being made with forced labor. The U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS), which leads trade enforcement under these laws, requested an analysis of trade enforcement and its impact. Researchers set out to (1) assist DHS in developing analytical capabilities for assessing the impact of its efforts to combat forced labor through trade enforcement and (2) evaluate the impact that DHS's actions and investments have had on meeting the goals of eliminating U.S. imports of goods made with forced labor and eliminating the use of forced labor globally. This report outlines the researchers' methods for evaluating DHS's impact and presents findings on efforts and recommendations for strengthening enforcement.

The title of this report asks, "Is U.S. trade enforcement making a difference, and can it do more?" In short, the answer to both questions is "yes." Trade enforcement appears to be making a difference, but it can also do more, even if some aims of U.S. policy remain out of reach. Early evidence suggests that many stakeholders are taking note, and some are changing behavior in response. Focusing on the effects of the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act of 2021, the authors' analysis suggests that a combination of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security's (DHS's) interventions and changes in businesses' behavior has led to a decline in direct imports of goods originating from the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region. However, deeper ties to that region will be difficult to root out and expunge, and reducing the use of forced labor globally might be yet more difficult. But these challenges do not negate the value of trying.

The world may remember 2022 as the year of generative artificial intelligence (AI): the year that large language models (LLMs), such as OpenAI's GPT-3, and text-to-image models, such as Stable Diffusion, marked a sea change in the potential for social media manipulation. LLMs that have been optimized for conversation (such as ChatGPT) can generate naturalistic, human-sounding text content at scale, while open-source text-to-image models can generate photorealistic images of anything (real or imagined) and can do so at scale. Using existing technology, U.S. adversaries could build digital infrastructure to manufacture realistic but inauthentic (fake) content that could fuel similarly realistic but inauthentic online human personae: accounts on Twitter, Reddit, or Facebook that seem real but are synthetic constructs, fueled by generative AI and advancing narratives that serve the interests of those governments. In this Perspective, the authors argue that the emergence of ubiquitous, powerful generative AI poses a potential national security threat in terms of the risk of misuse by U.S. adversaries (in particular, for social media manipulation) that the U.S. government and broader technology and policy community should proactively address now. Although the authors focus on China and its People's Liberation Army as an illustrative example of the potential threat, a variety of actors could use generative AI for social media manipulation, including technically sophisticated nonstate actors (domestic as well as foreign). The capabilities and threats discussed in this Perspective are likely also relevant to other actors, such as Russia and Iran, that have already engaged in social media manipulation.