{"id":8816,"date":"2026-09-24T15:10:30","date_gmt":"2026-09-24T22:10:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/novus2.com\/righteouscause\/?p=8816"},"modified":"2026-09-24T15:10:30","modified_gmt":"2026-09-24T22:10:30","slug":"is-china-really-why-america-must-win-the-ai-race","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/novus2.com\/righteouscause\/2026\/09\/24\/is-china-really-why-america-must-win-the-ai-race\/","title":{"rendered":"Is China really why America must win the AI race?"},"content":{"rendered":"

China is why America must win the AI race<\/strong><\/a><\/h3>\n

A recent AI-focused Wall Street Journal editorial had a critical insight: \u201cIf what they see in their shops is truly dangerous, by all means be responsible and \u2018align\u2019 development.\u201d Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, who criticized Anthropic\u2019s proposal, recently noted: \u201cWe want America to succeed.\u201d As Mark Zuckerberg has put it, America must \u201caccelerate innovation and slow geopolitical rivals.\u201d<\/p>\n

That is the paradox at the center of the AI debate. AI safety and the geopolitical AI race are often discussed as if they were separate issues. They are not. Calls for restraint may be justified when frontier systems pose genuine risks. But restraint by American frontier labs cannot be considered in isolation from the country\u2019s principal strategic opponent. America should not choose between AI leadership and AI safety; it needs both.<\/p>\n

The issue with AI is that you can\u2019t reverse it now or put it back in the box. And the problem is not what American AI companies will do; I believe that when bitter rivals agree on the need for restraint, this will happen. But such responsible restraint cannot be considered in isolation from what China is willing to do. Can the West ignore the rise of China? (A population of 1.4 billion, rare earth minerals of 44 million tons, exports of $3.77 trillion, government debt 94% of GDP, etc.) The Chinese do everything they can to beat America.<\/p>\n

The Communist Party governs through a centralized political system capable of directing enormous economic resources toward this new battlefield. Whatever one thinks of that system of directed capitalism, its ambitions in Artificial Intelligence — or in space, where China has also made major advances — cannot simply be wished away. The margin of AI leadership may be just a few months, because the innovation is quickly copied. Can the U.S. and China take joint action on AI risks? Only a naive person would place absolute trust in a red dictatorship where the bureaucrats reign.<\/p>\n

It will be a disaster — and an act of hubris — if China wins the AI race. So, in a way, Donald Trump \u2013 I rarely agree with him 100 percent — is right in saying \u201cwe must not slow down.\u201d America needs to win the race for Artificial Intelligence because a winning outcome for us will be a way to protect our way of life. Thus, AI leadership is not merely an economic or technological question. It is increasingly connected to national security, military capability, scientific research, and the ability to shape the standards governing a technology that is affecting the entire world.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The American Thinker article by Dimitris Eleas is right to frame AI as a national-security and civic-governance issue\u2014but \u201cwinning the AI race\u201d is an evocative slogan, not a measurable end state. The more defensible objective is durable U.S. advantage: the ability to develop, deploy, secure, and govern consequential AI better than strategic rivals without sacrificing the liberties the technology is supposedly meant to protect.<\/p>\n

The problem with \u201cwinning\u201d<\/strong><\/span><\/h2>\n

The American Thinker essay argues that the United States needs both AI leadership and safety, linking leadership to military capability, science, economic power, and the standards that govern the technology. That is a serious strategic claim. But its race metaphor compresses a sprawling contest into an imagined finish line. AI is not a single product, nor do nations possess one uniform level of \u201cAI.\u201d It is an evolving stack of chips, electricity, data centers, algorithms, models, talent, applications, robotics, cybersecurity, institutions, and rules.<\/p>\n

Current evidence already undermines the idea of a simple U.S.-China ranking. Stanford\u2019s 2026 AI Index finds that U.S. and Chinese models have traded the performance lead since early 2025; as of March 2026, the leading U.S. model held only a 2.7 percent edge. The United States still produces more leading models and attracts much more private investment, while China leads in publication volume, citations, patent volume, and industrial-robot installation. In other words, both countries can be \u201cahead\u201d at once\u2014on different measures.<\/p>\n

What would count as success?<\/strong><\/span><\/h2>\n

A credible U.S. scorecard should track a portfolio rather than one leaderboard:<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n
Dimension<\/strong><\/span><\/th>\nMeaningful benchmark<\/strong><\/span><\/th>\n<\/tr>\n<\/thead>\n
Frontier capability<\/td>\nReproducible performance on difficult, evolving tests for reasoning, coding, science, multimodal work, and reliable long-horizon agents<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Compute and chips<\/td>\nSecure domestic and allied access to advanced chips, manufacturing tools, cloud capacity, energy, and networking<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Diffusion<\/td>\nAdoption that measurably improves productivity, scientific discovery, health care, defense readiness, and public services<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Security<\/td>\nResistance to cyber misuse, model theft, data poisoning, biological-risk enablement, and catastrophic loss of human control<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Governance<\/td>\nAuditable evaluation, incident reporting, legal accountability, privacy protections, and rights-respecting use at home and abroad<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Coalition power<\/td>\nInteroperable standards and supply chains with democratic allies\u2014not merely unilateral U.S. output<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n

The key test is sustained advantage<\/strong><\/span>, not a one-time model release. The United States could lead a benchmark today and lose influence tomorrow if Chinese systems are cheaper, more efficient, widely deployed, or embedded in global industrial infrastructure. Brookings similarly describes this as a multidimensional competition across compute, models, adoption, integration, and deployment\u2014not a single contest.[brookings<\/a>]<\/p>\n

There is no finish tape<\/strong><\/span><\/h2>\n

There isn’t one, and Eleas quietly admits it. His stated goal is for America to remain the strongest player in a multipolar system. That describes a standing position to defend every year, not a tape to break. Superintelligence won’t serve as a finish line either; it is a definition labs will declare when convenient. Meanwhile, China may lose at the frontier and still prevail if its good-enough systems become entrenched worldwide, as Huawei and ZTE did. The contest that counts is over which technology the rest of the world builds on.<\/p>\n

The race after the race<\/strong><\/span><\/h2>\n

Even a clear American lead would only move the competition to power grids, robotics, and raw materials. China already controls about 80 percent of the rare-earth supply chain. Then there is trust, which is where Eleas’s pairing of safety and leadership stops being idealism and becomes strategy. 87% of Chinese citizens trust AI; only 23% of Americans do. A nation that builds the technology but distrusts it will lose the deployment race.<\/p>\n

A program for durable victory. Eleas’s best idea is a government-backed frontier research effort modeled on the research that produced the Internet. Build on it with six commitments:<\/p>\n

    \n
  • Research. Create a national frontier-AI laboratory inside the national-security establishment, as Eleas proposes.<\/li>\n
  • Power. Build generation and transmission as critical infrastructure.<\/li>\n
  • Chips. Hold firm on advanced-chip exports.<\/li>\n
  • Exports. Make trusted American models the affordable default for allies.<\/li>\n
  • Security. Harden the labs, since federal agencies report industrial-scale distillation of American models by Chinese firms.<\/li>\n
  • Trust. Adopt a single federal safety and testing standard that answers Eleas’s call to define what must never be built.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n

    Finally, Congress should require an annual National AI Scorecard reporting the frontier gap, compute ratio, global adoption share, energy capacity, and public trust.<\/p>\n

    That scorecard is the finish line the race lacks. It won’t end the competition, because nothing will. But every year it will tell us whether we’re winning.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    China is why America must win the AI race A recent AI-focused Wall Street Journal editorial had a critical insight: \u201cIf what they see in their shops is truly dangerous, by all means be responsible and \u2018align\u2019 development.\u201d Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, who criticized Anthropic\u2019s proposal, recently noted: \u201cWe want America to succeed.\u201d As Mark…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":8817,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[23,247,153],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8816","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-artificial-intelligence","category-china","category-technology"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/novus2.com\/righteouscause\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/Gemini_Generated_Image_eg2vvpeg2vvpeg2v.jpeg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/novus2.com\/righteouscause\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8816","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/novus2.com\/righteouscause\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/novus2.com\/righteouscause\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/novus2.com\/righteouscause\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/novus2.com\/righteouscause\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8816"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/novus2.com\/righteouscause\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8816\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8819,"href":"https:\/\/novus2.com\/righteouscause\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8816\/revisions\/8819"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/novus2.com\/righteouscause\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/8817"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/novus2.com\/righteouscause\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8816"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/novus2.com\/righteouscause\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8816"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/novus2.com\/righteouscause\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8816"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}