December 04, 2017
China’s Artificial Intelligence Strategy Poses a Credible Threat to U.S. Tech Leadership
Last month, Eric Schmidt, the chairman of Google’s parent company Alphabet, delivered a wake-up call: the unchallenged technological supremacy that the United States has enjoyed since the fall of the Soviet Union is over. The future will belong to countries that can surf the technological tidal wave of artificial intelligence, and while China’s efforts appear up to the challenge, the United States is swimming in the wrong direction.
When China released its national AI strategic plan this summer announcing it would lead the world in AI technology by 2025, some in the military and Silicon Valley scoffed. They repeated the same tired cliché that China’s tech industry and scientific researchers can’t innovate, only copy. Schmidt, by contrast, sees China’s AI ambitions as completely believable “You’re crazy to treat them as somehow second class citizens” he said, addressing an audience full of American national security officials and AI researchers.
Rather than being significantly behind, Chinese programmers now routinely win international machine learning competitions. China’s tech giant Baidu is unambiguously one of the global leaders in AI research, having developed an AI system with better-than-human speech recognition performance a year before any Western firm. China is not yet the overall leader in AI technology, but they are not far behind and catching up quickly.
Read the full commentary in the Council on Foreign Relations blog.
More from CNAS
-
Energy, Economics & Security / Technology & National Security
Beyond Bans: Expanding the Policy Options for Tech-Security ThreatsStuck between a rock (the fact that banning all Chinese tech that poses a risk is expensive and impractical) and a hard place (the fact that many existing mitigation proposals...
By Geoffrey Gertz
-
Indo-Pacific Security / Technology & National Security
Cyber Crossroads in the Indo-PacificThe Indo-Pacific faces a cyber crossroads. Down one path lies deeper military, intelligence, and economic ties between Washington and its key allies and partners in this strat...
By Vivek Chilukuri, Lisa Curtis, Janet Egan, Morgan Peirce, Elizabeth Whatcott & Nathaniel Schochet
-
Technology & National Security
Securing America’s AI Future: Federal Research and Development PrioritiesOn April 29, 2025, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) issued a Request for Information on the Development of a 2025 National Artificial Intelligenc...
By Caleb Withers & Spencer Michaels
-
Middle East Security / Technology & National Security
‘We Want Peace’: How Attacks Between Israel and Iran Could Impact People in NCRetired Lt. Gen. Jack Shanahan is an adjunct senior fellow at the Center for New American Security. Shanahan provided some context on how the two Middle East countries got her...
By Lt. Gen. Jack Shanahan