Interview
An insider perspective on China and AI, from Biden’s NSA | The Cognitive Revolution
- The United States is expected to enter a period of intensive great power competition characterized by strategic jostling and potential "elbow throwing" rather than a clear winner-take-all outcome or inevitable conflict, provided sufficient diplomatic guardrails and engagement are maintained.
- Transformative AI capabilities are projected to arrive within the next couple of years with high certainty for policy planning, potentially influencing economic, societal, and national security dimensions, though the arrival of superintelligent AI (AGI/ASI) by 2027–2030 remains uncertain.
- China is anticipated to exert a "China Shock 2.0" through massive state subsidization of strategic industries and flooding markets with cheap goods, while simultaneously threatening to control the global tech stack and pre-positioning malware within critical U.S. infrastructure.
- The U.S. is expected to face significant bureaucratic hurdles in legislative and military AI adoption, with Congress reacting only to real-world catastrophes or impacts and the Department of Defense lagging due to inertia, unlike the PLA which may be better positioned for rapid AI integration.
- Strategic policy will prioritize maintaining a U.S. lead in AI compute and technology to prevent other nations from gaining capabilities that could pose an existential risk, including limiting chip sales to Gulf nations and ensuring the majority of compute build-outs remain domestic.
- Export controls are viewed as potentially effective in limiting Chinese AI advancements in the short term, but their long-term efficacy is uncertain if the AI timeline extends beyond 2030 or if China develops a chip industry within five years.
- The outlook includes risks of job displacement, wealth concentration, and deepening industrial hollowing out if AI benefits remain concentrated, alongside the possibility of diplomatic friction if the U.S. fails to manage the integration of AI into military doctrine and conflict scenarios.
- Future relations with China are framed as a managed competition where the U.S. seeks to avoid regime change or direct military escalation while deepening people-to-people connections, though this is balanced against the expectation of continued consolidation of power under the current Chinese leadership.
- The U.S. government faces a dissonance between stated AI action plans and the current administration's resistance to regulation, creating a gap between current policy urgency and the reactive nature of legislative bodies that typically require tangible impacts to act.
- Strategic calculations will increasingly focus on securing power supply chains, preventing the offshoring of future compute capabilities, and enforcing high security standards to stop the diversion of advanced chips, while avoiding a scenario where reliance on other nations for compute matches historical dependencies on Middle Eastern energy.