US and China Vie for AI Strategic Dominance

The US–China competition over AI has moved well beyond chatbots into military systems, healthcare, and industrial productivity. Wynton Hall’s new book Code Red frames the struggle as a geostrategic contest with broad societal consequences (NYPost, April 6, 2026). Analysts emphasize divergent national approaches: China focuses on embedding AI across industry and infrastructure, while the United States prioritizes service-oriented innovation, frontier models, standards influence, and national-security-aligned industrial policy. The debate over whether to treat the relationship as a zero-sum arms race matters for practitioners: it shapes funding, export controls, supply-chain decisions, safety regimes, and the research agenda for dual-use systems like autonomous weapons and surveillance tools.