China's AI Arsenal That Alarms the West
For years, the Western world has regarded China’s tech industry with a wary eye. China is often labelled a ‘factory of imitators’ that only knows how to copy AI innovations from the United States, such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT or Google’s Gemini.
However, that derisive view now seems due for dismissal. The latest Foreign Affairs report reveals more troubling facts: China has now built its own AI weapons arsenal.
The capabilities of AI-enabled weapons are no longer mere copying; they are beginning to dictate the direction of future warfare.
For Beijing, AI is not merely a writing aid or a tool for creating funny images. AI is an instrument of geopolitical and military supremacy.
The Foreign Affairs report is the result of research by a team from Georgetown University’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology (CSET), which examined thousands of publicly available Chinese military procurement documents published over the past three years.
Unlike the tech landscape in Silicon Valley, often marred by tensions between tech giants and the Pentagon, China has a strategy that is strikingly different.
Under Xi Jinping’s leadership, the boundary between civil technology companies and the military (the People’s Liberation Army/PLA) is deliberately blurred.
The strategy, known as civil-military fusion, requires tech giants such as Baidu, Tencent, and Alibaba to share their latest AI innovations with the Chinese military.
As a result, facial recognition technology, natural language processing, and even computer vision algorithms initially developed for the consumer market have quickly been repurposed into target-tracking systems and lethal military-intelligence analysis.
The PLA has not only experimented with single drones, but has created swarms of hundreds to thousands of AI-powered small drones capable of communicating with one another.
Additionally, they can adapt to changing battlefield conditions in real time and make attacking decisions without the need for human operator control.
The drone-swarm concept is specifically designed to overwhelm enemy air defence systems.