R&D

"China ultimately will want to win – it has to innovate and invest in R&D. Look at what it did with Deepseek," says Mr Einstein, referring to the China-built AI chatbot.

"We cant breach those agreements so we have to eat the cost of the tariffs and make trade offs within our own companies. Typically that will be in reduction of staff or research and development and I predict R&D will come first. That's a disappointing outcome."

"We don't support tariffs, to be clear. In pharma, about 70% of global R&D takes place in the United States. So we're creating the next generation of breakthroughs and cures. But the production is heavily weighted outside the US. And that's not unique to our industry. It happened with electronics and software and other things".

Where was the serious investment in R&D?

This is partly because "foundational AI innovations typically come from deep R&D in universities and corporate research labs", Mr Bindra says.