AI is slipping away—and China is taking the lead, expert warns

UNITED STATES: In the United States, there is a strong belief that China has been on a drive for AI global dominance by 2030, and some Americans are finding it difficult to accept.

“We don’t want to live in a world built on AI Chinese rails,” said Wynton Hall, author of Code Red: The Left, the Right, China, and the Race to Control AI.

Whoever gains global supremacy in AI, he added, is going to have “battlefield full-spectrum dominance in things like cyber security, hacking of missile systems, hacking of infrastructure as well.”

He believes the world is almost there in terms of Chinese dominance in AI.

Speaking during an appearance on NewsMax2’s News Now, he argued that the strategy is to beat China without “becoming China.”

“And so we have to beat China without becoming China. Nobody wants to be a techno authoritarian surveillance state, but that’s why you see the president laser-focused on this.”

Besides the military aspect, he cited economics as another reason why the US must not let China gain dominance in that industry.

“One third of the S&P 500 is constituted around the American Mag Seven, or the big seven American tech companies. So it’s an economic tentpole.”

Hall said China is putting the money where its mouth is, as in spending more on importing semiconductors than they have oil.

“So we cannot sit back and be idle on this issue.”

However, the race for dominance in AI is divided into two distinct segments. China is said to be leading in one of them, while the United States is ahead in another.

China has an edge in robotics, and the US is having fierce competition among local tech giants in LLMs.

According to the BBC, Nick Wright, who works on cognitive neuroscience at University College London (UCL), says the battle is now between “brains” and “bodies”.

The US has traditionally led on so-called AI brains: the world of chatbots, microchips, and large language models (LLMs).

China is superior in AI “bodies”: robots (and in particular, “humanoid” robots that look eerily like people).

While China excels at manufacturing robotic hardware and simple “brains” for repetitive factory tasks, more complex operations require agentic AI.

Unlike basic software, this advanced AI acts as an independent agent, allowing robots to process multi-step assignments and navigate varied environments rather than just repeating pre-programmed motions.

Hence, when it comes to those high-powered brains, America still has the edge, some believe.