As China releases ever more capable AI models—ones that compete with Silicon Valley’s top offerings—many American AI and national-security researchers have been arguing, loudly and forcefully, that the world should fear Chinese AI supremacy. The outcomes they envision are catastrophic. I spoke with a number of such experts recently, and they warned of bots that could devise an impenetrable missile-defense system that makes obsolete America’s nuclear arsenal, or manufacture an endless drone army that overwhelms American defenses. They could develop bioweapons that “target specific ethnic groups, e.g. anybody but Han Chinese,” as one influential AI white paper put it in 2024. Rama Elluru, a senior director at the Special Competitive Studies Project, a nonpartisan think tank founded by the former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, suggested to me that Chinese AI models could be used to create “engineered humans,” akin to Marvel’s Captain America.
Perhaps anything is possible. At a moment when AI models are self-directing massive security breaches and designing novel pathogens, when Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei is warning about an “AI-enabled totalitarian nightmare” led by China, the worst-case scenarios can seem closer and closer.
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At the same time, it’s worth taking a breath to consider how much these dire imagined futures are getting ahead of where things actually stand. A struggle really is, of course, playing out among the U.S., China, and any number of other nations over whether democracy or authoritarianism will be the dominant global influence. Both the United States and China have a history of launching propaganda campaigns against each other; the Chinese government is reportedly starting a concerted effort to be the source of more AI training data, in part so that it can embed its views, such as over the status of Taiwan, into chatbots worldwide. But fears about China using AI for swift global domination assume that the technology will advance to a kind of superintelligence: AI models smart enough to develop smarter bots themselves, which would lead whichever country controls them to enter “escape velocity where your adversaries aren’t able to catch up,” David Lin, a senior director at the SCSP who previously covered China and technology at the CIA, told me. It is not clear that such an omniscient digital being can or will be built.
The White House has further muddled matters by taking a series of contradictory stances toward Chinese technology. It has, for example, revised its policy on exports to more easily allow the sale of advanced AI chips to China, while also going back and forth on whether the Pentagon and U.S. intelligence agencies can use the most advanced AI models of Anthropic. How seriously can anyone take the idea that the two nations are locked in a “hot Cold War II,” to quote Palantir chief technology officer Shyam Sankar, when the government is arguably enabling China’s own AI ambitions?
The technological race between the U.S. and China is so often discussed as a winner-takes-all competition. But such a narrow framing obscures what’s most at stake for Americans.
China is an obvious rival to the United States, as most former Biden-administration and current Trump-administration officials would agree. But that also makes “China” a convenient boogeyman for AI lobbyists and those with a clear financial interest in the industry, such as the former White House AI adviser David Sacks, who has said that “the AI race is even more important than the Space Race.”
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The two countries are not at war, but the most hawkish AI executives and national-security officials nonetheless fear that AI could confer what in military terms is called a “decisive strategic advantage.” Here is where the Cold War analogies come in. Such an advantage would entail the ability to land some sort of crushing blow that your opponent cannot recover from, “as if one country had nuclear weapons and no other country did, or maybe an even more extreme version of that,” Kyle Chan, a fellow at the Brookings Institution’s John L. Thornton China Center, told me.
Plenty of reasons exist to be cautious of this framing. For starters, to accept this argument, one has to assume that very soon, bots will exist that are smarter than the pooled expertise of entire nations. That’s total speculation, so the war-gaming can amount to “choose your own adventure,” R. David Edelman, an AI-policy researcher at MIT who previously served on President Obama’s National Security Council, told me.
Some pragmatic issues also exist. Software alone can’t win wars: The Pentagon is reportedly using AI models to speed up its target selection in Iran, but no matter how smart those bots are, America nonetheless is not exactly winning the war. Iran, for its part, seems to be hacking America’s water utilities—but those water systems are small and separate from one another, and have built-in physical redundancies. For similar reasons, a hack of a grid or bank would have serious but, in some ways, limited repercussions. These are all grave threats, to be sure, but they are not civilization-ending.
And translating any future ideas from AI into the physical world could take years. Even if AI cracked the code to create super soldiers, the military would have to figure out how to incubate and grow them, or else edit genes in adults without killing them. An AI system might say, Here’s how to defend against nukes, but that would leave the issue of building thousands or millions of missile interceptors on the table. In part for these reasons, no single AI-conferred advantage is likely to be large enough to permit any country to conquer the world. “It strains credibility that six months of advantage in AI could be the difference between the U.S. winning and losing a war with any adversary,” Edelman said.
In any case, the technology’s military capabilities might matter less than its effects on the economy. AI models are released as products. The top models from Chinese AI companies, including Moonshot AI, Z.ai, DeepSeek, and Alibaba, are by all accounts almost as good as and far cheaper to use than offerings from OpenAI, Anthropic, or Google. Simply put, that makes Chinese AI more economical for many companies looking to adopt the technology. Indeed, relative to the U.S., China’s government and businesses are “moving very fast,” Chan said.
If this is an economic race rather than a war, then it’s one that the United States could very well lose. “I don’t think I’ve ever heard any executives or researchers describe their work as part of a national contest against the United States,” Grace Shao, an analyst who covers AI and China and the author of the newsletter AI Proem, told me. Instead, “the more important race in China may be the race to diffuse AI into the real economy.”
China’s biggest advantage in the AI race comes from the physical world. This has little to do with AI itself: Decades of being a manufacturing powerhouse and implementing targeted industrial policy have made the country a leader in producing renewable-energy equipment, electric vehicles, robots, and other complex technologies. The country manufactures some 90 percent of all of the crucial components in solar panels. Last year, nearly 90 percent of humanoid robots sold were Chinese. Meanwhile, the U.S. is failing to meet AI’s electricity demands and has struggled to resupply missiles during the war in Iran.
[Tom Nichols: Iran, not Trump, is in control of this war]
“China has this strategy of exporting its technology globally,” Elluru said. Through its Belt and Road Initiative, China has helped build highways, ports, power plants, fiber-optic cables, and data centers throughout Asia, Africa, and Latin America; AI services are the logical next offering. The concern, for the U.S., is that “this technology sphere of influence congeals into political alignment” with Beijing, Daniel Remler, a senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security who previously led AI policy at the State Department, told me.
For instance, dependence on Chinese technology makes it more likely for a government to support Chinese efforts on the global stage and vote with China at the United Nations. Several nations benefiting from these investments have sided with China in its mission to claim Taiwan. China has been accused of using ports, e-commerce platforms, and telecommunications networks in other countries to hoover up data. Already the nation is using AI to enhance its domestic-surveillance apparatus and further crack down on dissent; the spread of Chinese data centers and AI agents abroad could only expand that authoritarian web. National-security analysts are concerned that, in the case of military conflict, China could threaten to shut off partner nations’ digital communications or power grids—including in countries with a large American-military presence. The greatest threat of Chinese “artificial general intelligence” is not some sudden death blow so much as a hastening of the ongoing decline of American hegemony—and the freedoms, at home and around the globe, that at its best the U.S. seeks to enshrine.
Yet the Trump administration and AI industry’s approach to competing with China has been a mess. The White House spokesperson Liz Huston told me that “the United States leads the world in AI innovation, and President Trump will keep it that way.” The administration’s current policies on AI chips, Chinese-made robot parts, advanced cybersecurity models, and open-weight AI are one big contradictory jumble. At a summit this spring, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth stressed “rightful alarm regarding China’s historic military buildup” just weeks after President Trump visited Beijing and said the nations would have a “fantastic future together.” OpenAI, Anthropic, Nvidia, and the like can’t seem to agree on what they are lobbying for, either. All of which would seem like a great way to lose a technological race with China, any way you measure it.
There’s a certain déjà-vu quality to the AI race. Amid fears over Sputnik and nuclear proliferation, a report prepared at the direction of Henry Kissinger in 1958 declared that “should we ever allow the U.S.S.R. and Communist China to attain strategic superiority, we can be certain that subsequent events will be brutal.” According to a government report on the early years of the Advanced Research Projects Agency, “fervent belief in unending scientific progress” offered a way forward. Those words could have been written today by Amodei, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, or Secretary of State Marco Rubio. And indeed, this belief propelled America into many decades of technological advancement—in nuclear weapons, space exploration, computer systems, and more. Even back then, that agency, known today as DARPA, was quietly championing an emerging research area called artificial intelligence. J. C. R. Licklider, who championed the use of computer systems at ARPA in the early 1960s following the inspiration of Vannevar Bush, imagined that one day, machines that “will outdo the human brain” could make essentially all decisions of “military significance.” And ARPA developed the precursor to today’s internet.
Today’s AI race also traces back to the 2010s, when Silicon Valley began invoking China as a way to shape regulation. The idea of a technological arms race has “been wielded deliberately as a way to head off any attempts at regulating the tech sector” and, more recently, to champion “favorable industrial policy” for data-center construction, Sarah Myers West, a co–executive director of the AI Now Institute and former senior adviser on AI at the Federal Trade Commission, told me.
In 2018, while testifying before Congress, Mark Zuckerberg said that “if we make it too hard for American companies to innovate in areas like facial recognition, then we will lose to Chinese companies.” A few years later, a dozen former national-security officials wrote a letter to Congress arguing that “antitrust proposals that target specific American technology firms” risked “undermining America’s key advantage vis-à-vis China.” Today Silicon Valley is instead using the specter of China to angle for more and better AI, in more places, and faster.
American officials and tech executives are not wrong to want to compete. But the dominance of an oversimplified U.S.-China AI race, without clarity about who is racing and to where, doesn’t just mangle policy making; it obscures that the ultimate beneficiary of the AI boom ought to be citizens, not military contractors or Silicon Valley’s biggest corporations and investors. Rather than asking what kind of AI we’re building, Myers West said, one could ask, What kind of society are we building? The AI-accelerated spread of authoritarianism, within and outside of China’s borders, should be reason enough to worry. And if American AI executives and White House officials really cared about free-market competition, they might explore enforcing antitrust laws to separate the providers of AI models, data centers, and chips. If they were truly concerned about AI surveillance, they might look into finally passing some sort of federal digital-privacy legislation. And if they cared about spreading democratic AI abroad, they might take a close look at the state of democracy at home.
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