By Nathan Picarsic and Emily de La Bruyere
In August, Chinese researchers debuted the world’s largest brain-inspired supercomputer. The Darwin Monkey is just the latest in a string of People’s Republic of China (PRC) artificial intelligence breakthroughs – including the DeepSeek surprise and humanoid robots that race half marathons. These advances make clear that the United States risks losing the Artificial Intelligence (AI) contest to China. Less clear are the consequences: What happens if China wins?
Unlike the United States, China is not competing to develop the best AI technologies. Instead, Beijing is competing to scale its technologies, cheaply and efficiently, so that tomorrow’s AI universe is built in a Chinese ecosystem. If Beijing succeeds, it will cement unprecedented global control: Beijing will govern the perceptions and behaviors of people, markets, and states. To stop China, the United States must adopt a new competitive approach, one that prioritizes technological scale, not sophistication – and embraces open-source.
The AI revolution creates a strategic opportunity for China. AI is reshaping the Internet-era global hierarchy, granting China the chance to leapfrog the United States for leadership. The AI revolution is also generating new forms of global control; the ability not only to monitor international information, but also to shape how that information is processed and disseminated – and therefore how the resources, people, and systems that depend on it operate. (RELATED: EXCLUSIVE: Newsom’s China Whisperer The Daughter Of Mastermind Building Chinese-American Database For Beijing)
Beijing has positioned to seize this opportunity. AI technologies are differentiated in the market by their performance, price, and scale of adoption. China uses state control of the commercial sector to outcompete on all three dimensions. Beijing combines advanced technologies developed both at home and abroad with the inherent data advantage of its closed system to game performance. Beijing subsidizes its companies to win on price. And to capture scale, China protects its domestic market, encourages its tech companies to consolidate, and backs their internationalization.
Beijing’s approach is working. China is not just keeping pace or catching up: It is winning in the new-type platforms defining the AI era. ByteDance owns AI-enabled social media; SHEIN and Temu AI-enabled e-commerce. In areas where software and hardware connect, China’s advantage is only more marked: The PRC leads the world in smart city systems, smart agriculture, and industrial robotics. America has no answer to Hesai, DJI, or Kuka.
TOPSHOT – Robots compete in a boxing event during the World Humanoid Robots Games in Beijing on August 17, 2025. (Photo by Pedro PARDO / AFP) (Photo by PEDRO PARDO/AFP via Getty Images)
Soon, China’s already-established footholds of AI leadership will knit together. Everyone will start using Chinese AI platforms for everything, from software development to manufacturing to communication. These platforms will favor Chinese vertical applications, whether precision ag drones or robotaxis, granting Chinese companies ownership of those markets and Beijing ownership of the physical and virtual worlds.
If current trends continue, China will control the AI universe, the way the U.S. has controlled the Internet universe. This will engender de facto international dependence on China. Chinese companies will become the global economy’s leaders. Beijing will cement not only access to worldwide data but also the power to shape that data’s use – how social media feeds rank information and surveillance systems identify risk – and therefore markets, society, and governance.
This is a disastrous scenario for the United States. To avert it, America must abandon its traditional innovate-first strategy for technological competition. Today’s AI contest is not a race, where moving fastest matters. It is a fight, where size matters.
OpenAI’s first-mover, exquisite innovation approach will fail against China: DeepSeek’s distillation proved as much. The same holds for NVIDIA: Huawei’s recently-announced AI chip roadmap proves as much. Beijing hoovers up cutting-edge technologies, re-engineers them efficiently, and trumps America’s norms of trust and security with the appeal of low-cost scale. Beijing does this no matter how much the U.S. attempts to protect its technology or entice China to adopt it.
America needs a radically different playbook. Washington should prioritize defending the domestic market, not technology, from China. A trusted market will create a protected sandbox for AI development. In that sandbox, the U.S. tech sector and its regulators should embrace open-source, across the AI value chain, so that U.S. technologies can proliferate – and be incentivized to scale. Next-generation U.S. industry will build on that open-source foundation, creating smart factories and apps independent from, and competitive with, China’s. Those vertical applications will make America’s AI foundation more valuable, such that the U.S. ecosystem continues to grow.
America should save racing for the humanoid robots — and get in the fight.
Nathan Picarsic and Emily de La Bruyere are senior fellows at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies; co-founders of Horizon Advisory, a geopolitical research firm specializing in China’s tech policy; and fellows at the Krach Institute for Tech Diplomacy and National Bureau of Asian Research.
