Winning the AI Race

It would be tragic if China defeated America in the race for AI dominance, but America may suffer a more severe loss—losing its identity. We need to win, but we also need to preserve our national soul—the very act and form of America. As Jesus Christ said, “For what shall it profit a man if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?” 

Our government has given its strategy for artificial intelligence a blunt and bracing title: “Winning the Race.” I am glad of the bluntness, and I am glad of the verb, because there is a race, and we had better win it. The people who wrote that document understand at least that much. 

Let us be clear about whom we are racing. The People’s Liberation Army of China has spent a generation organizing itself around what Beijing openly calls “national total war.” Its announced defense budget has very nearly doubled since Xi Jinping took the chair. Its frontier AI models have closed much of the distance to our own. Under a doctrine of military-civil fusion, their large firms—Baidu, Alibaba, Huawei—are not merely companies but instruments of a state that draws no line at all between a civilian technology and a military one. “National total war” is not some academic Clausewitzianism; they actually mean it. It means a whole society conscripted to a single end, with no seam where the company stops and the war ministry begins. Such a state poses a three-pronged threat, and each is sharpening.