There can be no winners in a US-China AI arms race
AI competition is not a zero-sum game. Instead, the world’s superpowers need to work together to make sure AI benefits humanity.
By Alvin Wang Graylin and Paul Triolo, MIT Technology Review
The United States and China are entangled in what many have dubbed an “AI arms race.”
In the early days of this standoff, US policymakers drove an agenda centered on “winning” the race, mostly from an economic perspective. In recent months, leading AI labs such as OpenAI and Anthropic got involved in pushing the narrative of “beating China” in what appeared to be an attempt to align themselves with the incoming Trump administration. The belief that the US can win in such a race was based mostly on the early advantage it had over China in advanced GPU compute resources and the effectiveness of AI’s scaling laws.
