China is commercialising and monetising data as a strategic national asset to support its artificial intelligence and broader technology ambitions, a U.S. congressional advisory body said in a report released Tuesday, warning that the approach could give Beijing an edge over the United States in parts of the AI race. The U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission said China is systematically gathering domestic enterprise, operational and physical-world data that cannot be scraped from the open internet, which it described as especially valuable for training AI systems for business use, autonomous vehicles and humanoid robots. The report highlighted China's manufacturing and industrial robotics base as a large source of high-quality data for embodied AI, or AI systems operating in the physical world, potentially helping China develop robotics software for commercial and military uses. Mike Kuiken, the commission's vice chair, said China has spent the last half decade consolidating, labeling and refining data, while making it rapidly available to entities in ways that support innovation and strengthen Chinese Communist Party control. The report also said U.S. companies in China face risks under the country's strict data and cyber governance rules, after tighter cross-border data transfer oversight forced many multinationals to localize operations and separate China customer data from global systems. It recommended that Congress consider a national data strategy that treats data as an economic asset.