MIT Technology Review

There can be no winners in a US-China AI arms race | MIT Technology Review 
 
 
 
 

 
 

 
 

 

 
 

 
 

 
 
 
 
 

 
 
 
 
 You need to enable JavaScript to view this site.
 

 Skip to Content The United States and China are entangled in what many have dubbed an “ AI arms race .” 

 In the early days of this standoff, US policymakers drove an agenda centered on “winning” the race, mostly from an economic perspective. In recent months, leading AI labs such as  OpenAI  and  Anthropic  got involved in pushing the narrative of “beating China” in what appeared to be an attempt to align themselves with the incoming Trump administration. The belief that the US  can  win in such a race was based mostly on the early advantage it had over China in advanced GPU compute resources and the effectiveness of AI’s  scaling laws .

 But now it appears that access to large quantities of advanced compute resources is no longer the defining or sustainable advantage many had thought it would be. In fact, the capability gap between leading US and Chinese models has essentially disappeared, and in one important way the Chinese models may now have an advantage: They are able to achieve  near equivalent results  while using only a small fraction of the compute resources available to the leading Western labs.    

 The AI competition is increasingly being framed within narrow national security terms, as a zero-sum game, and influenced by assumptions that a future war between the US and China, centered on Taiwan, is inevitable. The US has employed  “chokepoint” tactics  to limit China’s access to key technologies like advanced semiconductors, and China has responded by accelerating its efforts toward self-sufficiency and indigenous innovation, which is causing US efforts to backfire.

 
 Recently even outgoing US Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimondo, a staunch advocate for strict export controls, finally admitted that using such controls to  hold back China’s progress on AI and advanced semiconductors is a “fool’s errand.”  Ironically, the unprecedented export control packages targeting China’s semiconductor and AI sectors have unfolded alongside tentative  bilateral and multilateral engagements  to establish AI safety standards and governance frameworks—highlighting a paradoxical desire of both sides to compete and cooperate. 

 When we consider this dynamic more deeply, it becomes clear that the real existential threat ahead is not from China, but from the weaponization of advanced AI by bad actors and rogue groups who seek to create broad harms, gain wealth, or destabilize society. As with nuclear arms, China, as a nation-state, must be careful about using AI-powered capabilities against US interests, but bad actors, including extremist organizations, would be much more likely to abuse AI capabilities with little hesitation. Given the asymmetric nature of AI technology, which is much like cyberweapons, it is very difficult to fully prevent and defend against a determi

... (truncated, 15 KB total)