By Doug Kelly
The next 24 months could shape the next 100 years. That’s how fast artificial intelligence is moving, according to the world’s top technologists. And right now, the U.S. and China are locked in a neck-and-neck race to develop the next frontier: AI systems that don’t just follow commands, but reason, plan, and improve themselves.
Today’s AI is about chatbots and smart assistants. But experts say that by 2027, the next level of AI, artificial general intelligence (AGI), will reason like a Ph.D.-level human across many domains. AI superintelligence — models that far exceed human capabilities and can solve problems we cannot even comprehend — may follow just months later. In fact, Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg just declared that “developing superintelligence is now in sight,” with AI systems already beginning to improve themselves.
But what if China achieves AI superintelligence first?
That chilling scenario would shift the balance of global power overnight and not in our favor. Imagine a world where the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has dominant control over the most powerful cognitive engines ever created. That would give Beijing the ability to:
- Penetrate America’s defense and commercial systems through automated cyberattacks that adapt in real time, using zero-day exploits to disable satellites, power grids, weapons platforms, and more.
- Dominate the global information space by flooding open networks with AI-generated propaganda, while censoring or rewriting the past with breathtaking speed and scale.
- Export surveillance and control through the digital infrastructure it builds and sells, embedding authoritarian values into the operating systems of other nations.
- Dismantle economic competitiveness by using superintelligent systems to outmaneuver American businesses in innovation, finance, logistics, and scientific discovery.
That’s the logical endgame if China wins the AI race. This isn’t new: China has been planning for this moment since at least 2017, when it launched its National AI Development Plan and laid out a roadmap to lead the world in AI by 2030. Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt recently warned Congress that “if [China] comes to superintelligence first, it changes the dynamic of power globally, in ways that we have no way of understanding or predicting.”