Artificial intelligence has quietly become the defining battleground in the military rivalry between the United States and China—yet both powers are simultaneously racing to deploy it and scrambling to avoid catastrophic miscalculation. The dynamic, described by analysts at China-US Focus as "coopetition," captures a tension that is reshaping global security.
On the competition side, both nations are integrating AI into weapons systems, intelligence processing, and autonomous unmanned platforms. President Xi Jinping has publicly pushed for accelerating the "intelligentization" of China's military, while the Pentagon is pouring resources into AI to preserve battlefield advantages. According to China-US Focus, AI is now "a new arena of China-U.S. military competition."
The risks compound at every level. Tactically, autonomous systems make decisions faster than humans can track. Operationally, AI-enabled joint command networks could accelerate escalation in flashpoint regions. At the strategic level, the stakes are most alarming: AI could theoretically be used to locate and eliminate an adversary's nuclear forces before they can retaliate—what strategists call eliminating "second-strike" capability—destabilizing the deterrence logic that has kept nuclear weapons unused for eight decades.
Yet both governments have also taken steps toward guardrails. In December 2024, Presidents Xi and Biden issued a joint statement affirming that "humans, not artificial intelligence or machines, must retain control over nuclear weapons." The U.S. Department of Defense's Directive 3000.09 requires human judgment before any autonomous lethal action. China's Global Artificial Intelligence Governance Initiative similarly calls for human control and opposes AI arms races.
Proposed cooperation mechanisms include communication hotlines to flag AI-related anomalies and ongoing Track I and Track II dialogues between officials and academics. But as China-US Focus notes, both nations face a central dilemma: they could "win the race but lose security."
Why it matters: the same technology accelerating military decision-making is also compressing the time available for human judgment—making durable, verified agreements between Washington and Beijing more urgent than ever.