Is China Beating America to AI Supremacy?

OVER THE past year, I have been collaborating with a prominent leader in the technology industry to combine his decades of experience advancing frontier technologies, on the one hand, and my decades of experience in national security decisionmaking, on the other. Together, we have been trying to understand the national security implications of China’s great leap forward in artificial intelligence (AI). Our purpose in this essay is to sound an alarm over China’s rapid progress and the current prospect of it overtaking the United States in applying AI in the decade ahead; to explain why AI is for the autocracy led by the Chinese Communist Party (hereafter, the “Party”) an existential priority; to identify key unanswered questions about the dangers of an unconstrained AI arms race between the two digital superpowers; and to point to the reasons why we believe that this is a race the United States can and must win.

Americans believe that U.S. leadership in advanced technologies is so entrenched that it is unassailable. Likewise, many in the American national security community insist that in the AI arena China can never be more than a “near-peer competitor.” Both are wrong. In fact, China stands today as a full-spectrum peer competitor of the United States in commercial and national security applications of AI. Beijing is not just trying to master AI—it is succeeding. Because AI will have as transformative an impact on commerce and national security over the next two decades as semiconductors, computers and the web have had over the past quarter century, this should be recognized as a matter of grave national concern.