The U.S. could lose the artificial intelligence technology competition to China, which could have severe consequences for America’s national security and technological dominance, experts told the Daily Caller News Foundation.- China is advancing AI incorporation into its military and is leading in AI research, but the U.S. remains ahead in generative AI, according to experts, studies and government documents. The U.S. must speed up and modify its strategy if it wants to win the race, experts told the DCNF.
- “It’s no secret that the Chinese government wants to militarize its own AI systems and we are shaping up to be on the losing end of that digital arms race if we don’t get serious,” Joel Thayer, president of the Digital Progress Institute, told the DCNF.
The United States is at risk of blowing its lead in the artificial intelligence (AI) technology race to China, a development that could have profound implications for national security and technological dominance, experts told the Daily Caller News Foundation.
China is making strides in incorporating AI technology into its military and is at the forefront of worldwide AI research, but the U.S. remains the leader in generative AI, such as popular chatbot ChatGPT, according to experts, studies and government documents. The main U.S. strategy to slow down China’s advancement through semiconductor (chip) restrictions is insufficient and while the race is not a foregone conclusion, the U.S. must urgently accelerate and adapt its approach if it wants to secure victory, experts told the DCNF.
“It’s no secret that the Chinese government wants to militarize its own AI systems and we are shaping up to be on the losing end of that digital arms race if we don’t get serious,” Joel Thayer, president of the Digital Progress Institute, told the DCNF.
China’s dedication to AI advancement is evident from its “New Generation Artificial Intelligence Development Plan” in 2017, which underscores AI integration into its military. “Promote all kinds of AI technology to become quickly embedded in the field of national defense innovation,” the plan states. “Strengthen the construction of military and civilian AI technology standard systems.”
In February, a Chinese AI pilot beat a human in a dogfight, which ended in about 90 seconds, South China Morning Post reported. China’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA) detailed a strategy in December 2021 about the incorporation of AI, asserting China planned to deploy a military in which “man and machine” engaged in combat side by side, according to a DCNF translation.
The PLA claimed it was working on an AI “superorganism” with “deep learning,” “evolution” and deception capabilities, according to the translation.
Further, out of the 10 leading companies producing AI research, four are Chinese, according to a study by Nikkei Asia in collaboration with Dutch scientific publisher Elsevier. They are Tencent Holdings, Alibaba Group Holding and Huawei Technologies.
Anja Manuel, executive director of the Aspen Security Forum, told the DCNF that the U.S. undoubtedly continues to lead in generative AI and mentioned the argument that China’s strict regulations and authoritarian government may hinder the country’s innovation.
“Jury’s out on that one, but we do know that the Chinese government is very focused on making their companies successful in AI,” Manuel told the DCNF. “[It] has given … companies clear lanes about which tech innovation is just fine to pursue: for example, anything in visual recognition AI, autonomy (drones, cars) etc. Many Chinese companies are excellent at these specific AI applications.”
Beijing-based tech giant Baidu referenced China Science Daily’s reporting that its generative chatbot Ernie overtookChatGPT — an older iteration of the chatbot — in benchmark tests and beat the advanced GPT-4 in Chinese language tests in June. However, Ernie’s “comprehensive ability is slightly inferior to GPT-4,” according to China Science Daily.
The U.S. has worked on decelerating China’s AI advancement by limiting its access to semiconductors and other equipment, according to Axios.
“Most technologists agree that export controls on chips etc — although an important part of the policy tool box — won’t alone keep the U.S. in the lead over China,” Manuel told the DCNF. “The bottom line is that the U.S. is innovative and still in the lead, but to stay there, our focus should be on running faster ourselves. We won’t get there just by trying to ‘hobble’ our competitor.”
Thayer agreed. “Simply relying on moderating the chip market is not enough,” he said.
Moreover, Microsoft has a China-based AI chatbot dubbed Xiaoice that has 660 million worldwide users, according to the company.
Jake Denton, a research associate at the Heritage Foundation’s Tech Policy Center, told the DCNF that while Microsoft is an egregious example of an American company’s AI connection to China, other tech companies’ presence in the region is concerning as well. “There’s a lot of interconnectivity between the offices in Asia and North America,” he said. “Regardless of if it’s a formal office established purely for AI research or a generalist office, there are still implications. Any Silicon Valley company with a presence in China is going to in some way, be trying to please China.”
Denton raised the example of Apple having a multibillion-dollar deal with China and the company disabling the airdrop feature during Hong Kong protests against the Chinese government. “You have to assume the same exact requests would be granted for AI development,” Denton said. “That’s just the logical progression of this. All those companies, they’ll just shut you out of China if you don’t comply.”
Thayer also said we cannot rely on tech companies in this tech race.
“The AI market is concentrated among a few companies, dominated by Big Tech,” Thayer told the DCNF. “Worse, almost all have significant ties to China and its government. We can’t depend on industry alone to remove this threat China poses given certain market realities, especially in the tech sector.”
“We can still win this, but we need to turn this ship around!” Thayer said.
Scientist and AI entrepreneur Gary Marcus told the DCNF that the outcome of the tech race is undecided, but there is too much tension and distance related to it.
“A lot of the emphasis has been on the race between China and the US – which is certainly not decided yet – but we need to dial down the temperature a bit, as collaboration between the countries is going to be vital, unless and until we can figure out how to control AI and mitigate the short and long-term risks that both countries face.”
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Bypass Big Tech Censors
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.