Experts Warn China's AI Strategy Poses Existential Threat to U.S. Supremacy

China is actively undermining American global supremacy through artificial intelligence without firing a shot, a trio of experts warned ahead of President Xi Jinping's U.S. visit. Their concerns center on a three-part strategy: extracting the logic of American AI models, undercutting U.S. developers with free open-source software, and weaponizing these systems for cognitive warfare.

Leah Siskind, an AI research fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, described the situation not as a race but as a "multi-front war" where the U.S. is losing in some areas. She noted that while top American tech firms invest billions in proprietary systems, China focuses on distributing free, open-source models globally. This approach pressures U.S. companies, which face high costs for American technology, to adopt Chinese models, potentially exposing them to CCP censorship, hidden backdoors, and eventual global dominance.

"How can you compete with something that's free when American tech is very, very expensive?" Siskind asked. "How can we ensure that a Chinese open-source model would be truly clean, that it'd be truly free of CCP censorship? We can't be—we just wouldn't know. And that's by design. We wouldn't know what sort of trick backdoors might be implanted and how that could rear its head later on."

China expert Gordon Chang drew a parallel to Beijing's past tactics in the solar panel industry, warning that China intends to use free AI models to dominate the global market through cost and availability, similar to its strategy in other sectors. While the U.S. possesses a significant lead in physical infrastructure, with over 5,400 data centers compared to China's approximately 450, Chang noted China's focus on AI development.

Siskind explained that Chinese labs are closing the gap in AI development through a method called "knowledge distillation," where smaller models interrogate larger American models to copy their logic. This process allows China to bypass the substantial hardware and energy costs associated with training AI from scratch. The release of models like DeepSeek in 2025, which demonstrated capabilities rivaling cutting-edge American models with a fraction of the investment, exemplifies this threat.

The Department of Homeland Security has confirmed these concerns, issuing an advisory last week about Chinese companies conducting "industrial-scale knowledge distillation campaigns" to extract proprietary capabilities from U.S. frontier AI models.

Beyond economic undercutting and software theft, experts also highlighted China's deployment of AI into physical supply chains and influence campaigns. Siskind pointed to "embodied AI"—integrating artificial intelligence into factory automation, drones, and autonomous supply chains—as China's immediate physical priority. Chang warned that AI-enhanced propaganda poses a direct threat to American decision-making and democratic sovereignty.

"They're very good at cognitive warfare, and they can enhance their capabilities with artificial intelligence," Chang stated. "We do not want our elections determined in China. We do not want our critical national security decisions being made in Beijing. And that's not impossible."

As President Xi Jinping visits the U.S., experts urge the White House to treat these non-cinematic threats with the same urgency as traditional military posturing. Siskind emphasized the need for Washington to tighten chip export loopholes, blacklist foreign labs engaged in deceptive distillation, and incentivize U.S. open-source development to ensure advanced systems are developed under democratic values.

Chang warned that Beijing's AI ambitions are tied to its historical notion of "Tianxia," or "all under heaven," suggesting that an AI-powered China could seek global dominance. He cautioned that decisions critical to the U.S. should not be made in Beijing.

In a separate address to the United Nations General Assembly, President Donald Trump reiterated the U.S. goal of outpacing China in artificial intelligence, which he referred to as "superintelligence," and declared Washington's rejection of any "globalist scheme to control the artificial intelligence."