More money has been invested in AI than it took to land on the moon. Spending on the technology this year is projected to reach up to $700 billion, almost double last year’s spending. Part of the impetus for this frantic outlay is a conviction among investors and policymakers in the United States that it needs to “beat China.” Indeed, headlines have long cast AI development as a zero-sum rivalry between the U.S. and China, framing the technology’s advance as an arms race with a defined finish line. The narrative implies speed, symmetry, and a common objective.
But a closer look at AI development in the two countries shows they’re not only not racing toward the same finish line: “The U.S. and China are running in very different lanes,” says Selina Xu, who leads China and AI policy research for Eric Schmidt, the tech investor, philanthropist and former Google chief, in New York City. “The U.S. is doubling down on scaling,” in pursuit of artificial general intelligence (AGI) Xu says, “while for China it’s more about boosting economic productivity and real-world impact.”
Lumping the U.S. and China onto a single AI scoreboard isn’t just inaccurate, it can impact policy and business decisions in a harmful way. “An arms race can become a self-fulfilling prophecy,” Xu says. “If companies and governments all embrace a ‘race to the bottom’ mentality, they will eschew necessary security and safety guardrails for the sake of being ahead. That increases the odds of AI-related crises.”
Where’s the Real Finish Line?
As machine learning advanced in the 2010s, prominent public figures such as Stephen Hawking and Elon Musk warned that it would be impossible to separate AI’s general-purpose potential from its military and economic implications, echoing Cold War–era frameworks for strategic competition. “An arms race is an easy way to think about this situation even if it’s not exactly right,” says Karson Elmgren, a China researcher at the Institute for AI Policy and Strategy, a think tank in San Francisco. Frontier labs, investors, and media benefit from simple, comparable progress metrics, like larger models, better benchmarks, and more computing power, so they favor and compound the arms race framing.
Artificial general intelligence is the implied “finish line” if AI is an arms race. But one of the many problems with an AGI finish line is that by its very nature, a machine superintelligence would be smarter than humans and therefore impossible to control. “If superintelligence were to emerge in a particular country, there’s no guarantee that that country’s interests are going to win,” says Graham Webster, a China researcher at Stanford University, in Palo Alto, California.
An AGI finish line also assumes the U.S. and China are both optimizing for this goal and putting the majority of their resources towards it. This isn’t the case, as the two countries have starkly different economic landscapes.
When Is…
Read full article: The U.S. and China Are Pursuing Different AI Futures
The post “The U.S. and China Are Pursuing Different AI Futures” by Vanessa Bates Ramirez was published on 02/19/2026 by spectrum.ieee.org