The Biden administration’s new tariffs on Chinese electric vehicles won’t have a huge immediate impact on American consumers or the car market because very few such cars are sold in the United States.

But the decision reflects deep concern within the American automotive industry, which has grown increasingly worried about China’s ability to churn out cheap electric vehicles. American automakers welcomed the decision by the Biden administration on Tuesday to impose a 100 percent tariff on electric vehicles from China, saying those vehicles would undercut billions of dollars of investment in electric vehicle and battery factories in the United States.

“Today’s announcement is a necessary response to combat the Chinese government’s unfair trade practices that endanger the future of our auto industry,” Senator Gary Peters, a Michigan Democrat, said in a statement. “It will help level the playing field, keep our auto industry competitive and support good-paying, union jobs here at home.”

On Tuesday, President Biden announced a series of new and increased tariffs on certain Chinese-made goods, including a 25 percent duty on steel and aluminum and 50 percent levies on semiconductors and solar panels. The tariff on electric vehicles made in China was quadrupled from 25 percent. Chinese lithium-ion batteries for electric cars will now face a 25 percent tariff, up from 7.5 percent.

The United States imports only a few makes — electric or gasoline — from China. One is the Polestar 2, an electric vehicle made in China by a Swedish automaker in which the Chinese company Zhejiang Geely has a controlling stake. In a statement, Polestar said it was evaluating the impact of Mr. Biden’s announcement.

“We believe that free trade is essential to speed up the transition to more sustainable mobility through increased E.V. adoption,” the company said.

In the first quarter of this year, Polestar sold just 2,200 vehicles in the United States. Later this year, however, it is scheduled to start producing a new model, the Polestar 3, at a South Carolina plant operated by Volvo Cars, which Geely owns.

Volvo sells a Chinese-made plug-in hybrid sedan, the S90 Recharge, in the United States, and plans to start importing a new small sport utility vehicle, the EX30, to the United States from China this year. The car is expected to start at $35,000, making it one of the most affordable battery-powered models available in the country. The model has quickly become Volvo’s top-selling vehicle in Europe.

Volvo said on Tuesday that it was evaluating the potential impact of Mr. Biden’s new tariffs on its plans.

Internal combustion models that are made in China and sold in the United States include the Buick Envision S.U.V. made by General Motors, and Ford Motors’ Lincoln Nautilus. They are unaffected by the tariffs.

Tesla, G.M., Ford, Volkswagen, Hyundai and several other automakers have invested tens of billions of dollars in battery and electric vehicle factories in the United States. But with the exception of Tesla, automakers in the United States, Europe and Japan trail Chinese companies in scale, raw materials production and key technologies.

Contemporary Amperex Technology Company Limited, or CATL, the Chinese manufacturer that is the world’s largest producer of electric car batteries, said last month that it had developed a battery that could charge up enough in 10 minutes to allow a car to travel about 370 miles — a major leap compared with the batteries used by established Western and Asian automakers, including Tesla.

China’s lead in electric vehicles, which are seen as central to the auto industry’s future, has spurred concerns that Chinese cars could hit the U.S. market at prices that G.M., Ford and other traditional automakers wouldn’t be able to compete with.

BYD, a leading and fast-growing Chinese car and battery company, already sells a compact electric car, the Seagull, for less than $15,000 in China. And on Tuesday, it said it would begin selling a plug-in hybrid pickup truck in Mexico, although it added that it did not yet plan to sell the vehicle in the United States.

Chinese automakers like BYD, Geely and SAIC have been increasing car exports to Europe, Latin America and various Asian countries. The European Commission, the executive arm of the European Union, is investigating Chinese state subsidies to electric carmakers.

Some representatives of the U.S. auto industry have said the Chinese government’s support of its automakers has left factories there with the capacity to make vastly more cars than can be sold in the country.

“They’ve got a major E.V. overcapacity problem,” said John Bozzella, president of the Alliance for Automotive Innovation, the main lobbying arm for U.S. automakers.

“They’re building too many E.V.s — too many heavily subsidized E.V.s — for the domestic market and have no choice but to look abroad to offload those vehicles at budget prices,” Mr. Bozzella added. “The competitiveness of the auto industry in the U.S. will be harmed if heavily subsidized Chinese E.V.s can be sold at below-market prices to U.S. consumers”

Chinese officials have denied that the country is overproducing electric vehicles, solar panels and other products targeted by the Biden administration. “We hope the U.S. can take a positive view of China’s development and stop using overcapacity as an excuse for trade protectionism,” a spokesman for the Chinese Embassy in Washington, Liu Pengyu, said on Tuesday.

Automakers have already had a taste of how price competition can disrupt their electric vehicle plans. Over the last year, Tesla has cut prices on its models several times, reducing the costs of some models by more than 20 percent in total. Those cuts, combined with a slowdown in the growth of electric car sales, have made it extremely hard for G.M. and Ford to make money on battery-powered models.

In the first three months of the year, Ford’s electric vehicle division lost $1.3 billion before taking into account some expenses. Both Ford and G.M. have slowed electric vehicle production and delayed the introduction of new models. While G.M. is losing money on electric cars, the company has said it expects those vehicles to begin generating profits later this year.

The Biden administration has sought to support and encourage the production of batteries and electric vehicles in the United States to address climate change and encourage more domestic manufacturing.

China isn’t the only obstacle in the way. Americans’ enthusiasm for electric cars has waned over the past year, mainly because such vehicles sell for relatively high prices. Some buyers are also reluctant to buy because they are not sure there will be enough places to charge those cars easily and quickly.

In the first quarter of this year, 269,000 E.V.s were sold in the U.S. market, according to Kelley Blue Book. That was an increase of just 2.6 percent from a year earlier. Total sales of cars and light trucks grew more than 5 percent to 3.8 million vehicles.

“In a lot of ways, buying an E.V. requires a lifestyle change,” said Jessica Caldwell, executive director of insights at Edmunds, a market researcher. “A lot of people just say, ‘I don’t want the hassle of an E.V.’”

Alan Rappeport contributed reporting.

Ilya Sutskever, the OpenAI co-founder and chief scientist who in November joined three other board members to force out Sam Altman, the company’s high-profile chief executive, before saying he regretted the move, is leaving the San Francisco A.I. company.

Dr. Sutskever’s departure, which the company announced in a blog post on Tuesday, closes another chapter in a story that stunned Silicon Valley and that raised questions about whether Mr. Altman and his company were prepared to lead the tech industry into the age of artificial intelligence.

After returning to OpenAI just five days after he was ousted, Mr. Altman reasserted his control and continued its push toward increasingly powerful technologies that worried some of his critics. Dr. Sutskever remained an OpenAI employee, but he never returned to work.

“This is an emotional day for all of us,” Mr. Altman said in an interview. “OpenAI would not exist without him and certainly was shaped by him.”

In a statement, Dr. Sutskever said: “I have made the decision to leave OpenAI. The company’s trajectory has been nothing short of miraculous, and I’m confident that OpenAI will build A.G.I. that is both safe and beneficial.” A.G.I., or artificial general intelligence, is an as-yet-unbuilt technology that can do anything the brain can do.

Dr. Sutskever, 38, added that he was starting a new project, but did not elaborate.

A key OpenAI researcher, Jakub Pachocki, will replace Dr. Sutskever as chief scientist at the company, which is valued at more than $80 billion, according to a recent fund-raising deal.

On Monday, OpenAI unveiled a new version of its ChatGPT chatbot that can receive and respond to voice commands, images and videos, joining tech giants like Google and Apple in a race toward a new kind of talking digital assistant.

Founded in 2015 by Mr. Altman, Elon Musk and several young researchers, including Dr. Sutskever, OpenAI has long been at the forefront of A.I. research. Dr. Sutskever’s involvement provided the company with instant credibility. As a graduate student at the University of Toronto, he had been part of an A.I. breakthrough involving neural networks — the technology that has driven the field’s progress over the last decade.

In late 2022, OpenAI wowed the world with the release of ChatGPT, an online chatbot that could answer questions, write poetry, generate computer code and chat a lot like people. The tech industry quickly embraced what is called generative artificial intelligence — technologies that can generate text, images and other media on their own.

The result of more than a decade of research inside companies like OpenAI and Google, generative A.I. is poised to remake everything from email programs to internet search engines and digital assistants.

Mr. Altman became a spokesman for the shift toward generative A.I., testifying before Congress and meeting with lawmakers, regulators and investors around the world. In November, OpenAI’s board of directors unexpectedly ousted him, saying he could no longer be trusted with the company’s plan to eventually create artificial general intelligence.

The OpenAI board had six people: three founders and three independent members. Dr. Sutskever voted with the three outsiders to remove Mr. Altman as chief executive and chairman of the board, saying — without providing specifics — that Mr. Altman had not been “consistently candid in his communications.”

Greg Brockman, OpenAI’s chief operating officer and another co-founder, resigned from the company in protest. So did Dr. Pachocki.

Days later, as hundreds of OpenAI employees threatened to quit, Dr. Sutskever said he regretted his decision to remove Mr. Altman and effectively stepped down from the board, leaving three independent members in opposition to Mr. Altman.

Mr. Altman returned as chief executive after he and the board agreed to replace two members with Bret Taylor, a former Salesforce executive, and Lawrence Summers, a former U.S. Treasury secretary. Mr. Altman regained his board seat several months later, as the board expanded to seven people.

Last year, Dr. Sutskever helped create a Super Alignment team inside OpenAI to explore ways of ensuring that future versions of the technology would not do harm. Like others in the field, he had grown increasingly concerned that A.I. could become dangerous and perhaps even destroy humanity.

In the weeks leading up to Mr. Altman’s ouster, Dr. Pachocki, who helped oversee the creation of GPT-4, the technology at the heart of ChatGPT, was promoted to director of research at the company. After occupying a position below Dr. Sutskever, he was elevated to a position alongside him, two people familiar with the moves said.

After Mr. Altman was reinstated, Dr. Sutskever did not return to work. Mr. Altman indicated that he was hoping to negotiate his return, but ultimately that was not possible.

Dr. Pachocki has effectively served as chief scientist since November. After Dr. Sutskever recruited him and others to join OpenAI, he was among the key researchers on several of the company’s most important projects, including, most notably, GPT-4.

“I am grateful to Ilya,” Dr. Pachocki said in an interview. “We have different and in many ways complementary styles of leadership.”

Mr. Altman said he talked with Dr. Sutskever on Tuesday. “He has pushed us — and will continue to push us — to, as he says, feel the A.G.I.,” Mr. Altman said.