The United States and China are locked in an arms race that might determine the fate of the free world. But unlike the last Cold War, the competition isn’t just over nuclear weapons or advanced missiles. It is over artificial intelligence. And in this contest, there is no second place.
Yet in a recent interview with CNN’s Fareed Zakaria, Jensen Huang, president and CEO of Nvidia, said it “does not matter” whether China or the U.S. “gets there first” in AI development. Huang asserted that “in the end,” it won’t make a difference, and he dismissed concerns that recent leading AI technologies, such as DeepSeek, were “trained” in China. Huang told Zakaria that there is “no evidence” that it could be dangerous, and cheerfully cited the transformative impact that AI will have on industry.
To be sure, AI does offer promising results in fields such as medicine, engineering, and elsewhere. But who wields the tool will make all the difference. Huang’s comments are notable. As head of Nvidia, he is at the forefront of our technological competition with China. But his comments fail to recognize both the nature of America’s opponent and the scope of the threat.
China is both the largest and most technologically advanced police state in world history. Its ruling Chinese Communist Party is seeking to supplant the U.S. and become the world’s sole superpower. Deng Xiaoping, the CCP head for much of the last quarter of the 20th century, famously advised his countrymen to “hide your strength, bide your time.” But that era is over.
It would be tempting to think the danger is far from America’s shores. But China’s ambitions are global. And the CCP has shown that it is perfectly willing to use coercion to achieve its ends, with a history of targeting American businesses and even Americans themselves. In short, there is no escaping the China challenge. And AI will play a key role.
AI dramatically enhances both the speed and ability of processing data, providing the military that wields it best with what may be a decisive advantage. AI will make scouting and targeting both faster and more efficient. It will also serve as a force multiplier. And AI-powered autonomous weapons will offer the promise, and the peril, of the illusion of lowering battlefield losses, forever changing the calculus of war-making. On the other hand, AI will likely alter how nations deploy weapons of mass destruction.
As importantly, AI will change how conflicts are fought in the so-called “grey zone,” the purgatory between peace and war, where nations such as China and its allies, including Russia and Iran, often prefer to fight. These countries are master manipulators of public opinion, adept at disinformation and misinformation campaigns. Here too, AI will offer another advantage in what is often called cognitive warfare.
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China has spent decades constructing a massive surveillance state, and AI will allow it to project its capabilities far beyond the Indo-Pacific. The nation that has spent years brutally subjugating Uyghurs, Tibetans, and others will be positioned to take the lessons that it has learned and apply them elsewhere, even into American homes.
More than 100 years ago, the American historian Henry Adams warned, “I firmly believe that before many centuries more, science will be the master of man. The engines he will have invented will be beyond his strength to control.” Whether a free society or a totalitarian system is the first to master that science may make all the difference.
Sean Durns is a Washington, D.C.,- based foreign affairs analyst. His views are his own.
