April 01, 2026
China’s AI Is Spreading Fast. Here’s How to Stop the Security Risks
This article was originally published in War on the Rocks.
In late 2024, Chinese models accounted for one percent of global AI workloads. By the end of 2025, that figure had surged to 30 percent. Alibaba’s Qwen family now boasts over 700 million downloads, making it the world’s largest provider of “open-source” AI systems that are publicly released and capable of being downloaded and run locally. A constellation of Chinese AI labs — DeepSeek, Moonshot, and MiniMax chief among them — are increasingly popular fixtures of a global, open-source marketplace, which is starting to power everything from Indian academic research to America’s most elite technology startups.
The first problem is not about China, but about AI as a technology: It is incredibly difficult to audit the global supply chain for AI software.
The rapid integration of Chinese AI systems into U.S. national and global infrastructure poses four distinct baskets of possible threats to U.S. national security: supply chain poisoning, intelligence collection, capability uplift for malicious actors, and economic displacement — each requiring targeted interventions that avoid replicating China’s own protectionist playbook.
Read the full article in War on the Rocks.
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