Emerging Technologies and Chinese Challenges to US Innovation Leadership

This chapter considers the intensity of US–China strategic competition playing out within a broad range of artificial intelligence (AI) and AI-enabling technologies. It describes how great power competition is mounting within several dual-use high-tech fields, why these innovations are considered by Washington to be strategically vital, and how the US is responding to the perceived challenge posed by China to its technological hegemony. The chapter summarizes the responses by US decision makers and analysts to the debate about US decline and the rise of the narrative of an imminent shift to a multipolar order. It examines the nature of this particular “arms race” in the context of predictions of a shift toward a multipolar order. US analysts and policy makers have suggested a range of possible responses to these emerging security threats to preserve US technological leadership, which harnesses US natural advantages to push back against the rising great military powers in the multipolar order.