How the US Could Lose the AI Arms Race to China
America leads the world in developing the most advanced models, but China excels at fostering broad adoption.
The battle is joined.
Photographer: AFP
Great-power competitions are fundamentally technological contests: The country that sets the pace in an era’s key technologies tends to set that era’s rules. In recent weeks, both the US and China have rolled out their plans for winning the AI race — the competition to reach and exploit breakthroughs in artificial intelligence — and the consequences for the future balance of power could be profound. The US currently has the lead, but its position is perilous, not least because President Donald Trump is gutting policies that might hold Beijing back.
AI is already transforming how militaries fight and how economies function. If anything, the geopolitical stakes of the AI race are getting higher, especially considering the potential for artificial general intelligence — systems that reason like humans across a wide range of tasks.