AI's global race in the dark
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Illustration: Sarah Grillo/Axios
The U.S.'s great AI race with China, now freshly embraced by President Trump, is a competition in the dark with no clear prize or finish line.
Why it matters: Similar "races" of the past — like the nuclear arms race and the space race — have sparked innovation, but victories haven't lasted long or meant much.
The big picture: Both Silicon Valley and the U.S. government now agree that we must invest untold billions to build supporting infrastructure for an error-prone, energy-hungry technology with an unproven business model and an unpredictable impact on the economy and jobs.
What they're saying: "America is the country that started the AI race. And as president of the United States, I'm here today to declare that America is going to win it," Trump said at a Wednesday event titled "Winning the AI Race."
- Policy experts and industry leaders who promote the "race" idea argue that the U.S. and China are in a head-to-head competition to win the future of AI by achieving research breakthroughs, establishing the technology's standards and breaking the AGI or "superintelligence" barrier.
- They suggest that the world faces a binary choice between free, U.S.-developed AI imbued with democratic values or a Chinese alternative that's under the thumb of the Communist Party.
Flashback: The last time a scientific race had truly world-shaping consequences was during the Second World War, as the Manhattan Project beat the Nazis to the atomic bomb.
- But Germany surrendered well before the U.S. had revealed or made use of its discovery.
- The nuclear arms race with the Soviet Union that followed was a decades-long stalemate that cost fortunes and more than once left the planet teetering on an apocalyptic brink.
The 1960s space race was similarly inconclusive.
- Russia got humanity into space ahead of the U.S., but the U.S. made it to the moon first.
- Once that leg of the race was over, both countries retreated from further human exploration of space for decades.
State of play: With AI, U.S. leaders are once again saying the race is on — but this time the scorecard is even murkier.
- "Build a bomb before Hitler" or "Put a man on the moon" are comprehensible objectives, but no one is providing similar clarity for the AI competition.
- The best the industry can say is that we are racing toward AI that's smarter than people. But no two companies or experts have the same definition of "smart" — for humans or AI models.
- We can't even say with confidence which of any two AI models is "smarter" right now, because we lack good measures and we don't always know or agree on what we want the technology to do.
Between the lines: The "beat China" drumbeat is coming largely from inside the industry, which now has a direct line to the White House via Trump's AI adviser, David Sacks.
- "Whoever ends up winning ends up building the AI rails for the world," OpenAI chief global affairs officer Chris Lehane said at an Axios event in March.
- Arguing for controls on U.S. chip exports to China earlier this year, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei described competitor DeepSeek as "beholden to an authoritarian government that has committed human rights violations, has behaved aggressively on the world stage, and will be far more unfettered in these actions if they're able to match the U.S. in AI."
Yes, but: In the era of the second Trump administration, many Americans view their own government as increasingly authoritarian.
- With Trump himself getting into the business of dictating the political slant of AI products, it's harder for America's champions to sell U.S. alternatives as more "free."
China has been catching up to the U.S. in AI research and development, most tech experts agree. They see the U.S. maintaining a shrinking lead of at most a couple of years and perhaps as little as months.
- But this edge is largely meaningless, since innovations propagate broadly and quickly in the AI industry.
- And cultural and language differences mean that the U.S. and its allies will never just switch over to Chinese suppliers even if their AI outruns the U.S. competition.
- In this, AI is more like social media than like steel, solar panels or other fungible goods.
The bottom line: The U.S. and China are both going to have increasingly advanced AI in coming years. The race between them is more a convenient fiction that marshals money and minds than a real conflict with an outcome that matters.
