New CNAS Report on the World Altering Stakes of U.S. China AI Competition

Washington, April 22, 2025 - Today, the Center for a New American Security (CNAS) released a new report, Promethean Rivalry: The World-Altering Stakes of Sino-American AI Competition, by Bill Drexel.

The contest between China and the United States to harness the potential of artificial intelligence (AI) has become this generation's defining technological rivalry. The new report examines how the U.S.-China AI competition extends beyond military and economic advantages to four domains with world-altering significance: conflict norms, state power, emerging bioethics, and catastrophic risks.

The momentous shifts in these domains, fueled by AI progress, create distinct-but interrelated-challenges for each superpower's ambitions to lead internationally. While the United States has developed a coherent approach to AI in warfare, it lags behind China in leveraging AI for state power, as Beijing aggressively pioneers techno-authoritarian systems. In bioethics, AI-accelerated genomics threatens "chilling implications for future generations" should China lead this revolution. And America's cautious approach to AI risks inadvertently pushes developing economies toward China's disaster-prone approach to AI acceleration.

The analysis presents a sobering reality. Though many of the most pressing issues from AI demand superpower cooperation, the prospects for meaningful U.S.-China collaboration are highly limited. This disconnect is particularly troubling given what is at stake-from autonomous weapons systems to surveillance states, human genetic engineering, and AI-enabled catastrophes.

"China's diplomatic intransigence raises the stakes beyond military and economic advantage," Bill Drexel, the report author, warns. "Even near-equal AI capabilities between the superpowers become hazardous-likely triggering a race to the bottom in norms around the most consequential technological questions humanity has faced."

The report concludes that America's ability to shape AI's trajectory depends on extending its technological advantage over China as much as possible. Rather than focusing on unlikely cooperation, the United States must pursue decisive technical superiority fueled by a vision for American AI that advances democratic values and global development. Effectively managing the fraught issues on AI's horizon can strengthen the United States' soft power and technological advantage; failing to do so risks derailing American AI progress and ceding ground to Beijing.

The report issues several key policy recommendations and urges the United States to:

• More aggressively expand its lead over China's AI ecosystem in terms of compute capacity, data, talent, and institutions;

• Establish a President's Council on Artificial Intelligence to address the most fundamental questions facing open societies in the age of AI and to craft an agenda for the ambitious use of AI to enhance American democracy;

• Remain realistic about the limited prospects for substantive progress with Chinese interlocutors on issues in AI-powered conflicts, genetic engineering norms, and catastrophic risks;

• Champion a vision for American AI internationally commensurate with the technology's unique, historic potential to improve the human condition, focusing less on risks;

• Continue and further amplify its diplomatic efforts to establish norms on the responsible use of AI in militaries, AI in nuclear command and control, and-more discreetly-AI safety;

• Pioneer a political declaration on the responsible uses of artificial intelligence in biotechnology; and

• Work with like-minded partner nations to establish a techno-democracy innovation fund to match 15 percent of the estimated annual budget of the People's Republic of China for techno-authoritarian procurement.

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