Who Will Win The International AI Arms Race?

Who is Ahead in the AI Race?

The international AI arms race which kicked off with the release of DeepSeek AI in January 2025 seems to have cooled off as other AI systems from OpenAI and xAI updated their models to foster more computing power.

With the key players in this race being the United States and China, popular opinion has shifted between initially thinking China is leading the AI race, to seeing no winner and full cooperation in the long term, to now, a general sense that the United States will win the global AI arms race.

To understand why the United States will and must win the AI race, we need to break down how this AI war is going to be waged.

The Importance of Winning the AI Arms Race

AI has already begun revolutionizing how people use computer systems, and its full potential isn't even close to being unlocked. Whichever country leads the world in artificial intelligence will set global standards for quality of life, military power, health outcomes, or any metric which determines the superiority of one country to another.

In that case, losing the AI race poses an existential risk for not just a given nation's government and population, but also to humanity at large. If China wins the AI arms race, one should expect the values and biases of the Chinese government to be spread globally through the applications of that AI.

Whichever country has the most AI capability gains the upper-hand in:

• National Security: Military applications for AI are innumerable, from remote combat using predictive analytics, to actual robotic boots on the ground.

• AI research and development for Medicine: A country's superiority is also measured by their scientific and medical achievements. AI systems that have more computing power to research and draw data-driven discoveries will make the winner of the AI arms race have best health outcomes in the long run.

• Artificial General Intelligence (AGI): The next evolution of AI technology will be AGI able to reason just as dynamically as a human being. That new form of AI powered humanity could be the key to unlocking all the world's mysteries, from medicine to history.

• Economic Benefits: Setting the standard for AI power has the power to create new markets and systems for global supply chains.

• Information and Propaganda: The most powerful AI system in the world will determine which narratives inform people and which sources of training data will be taught to future generations using AI to answer all their questions.

How The US Can Win

Although the United States is currently ahead of the arms race, there are certain roadblocks that exist in our society that don't in China that hinder the development of our AI systems. They are:

• Government investment: Washington DC needs to invest more in the future of AI if it wants to compete with China who's government has a huge stake in AI.

• AI Talent: The US needs to retain its AI talent and ensure they don't defect to other tech companies. Comparatively, China has a massive talent pool for AI development that the US should take very seriously.

• Export Controls: The US's export controls on semiconductors to China were partially responsible for the country's development of DeepSeek. These Export Controls created the AI arms race and can still be beneficial in mitigating the rise of China.

• Semiconductor Strength: The US must retain its dominance over the semiconductor market.

These bulletpoints are not just the reasons why the United States are currently ahead of the AI arms race, but are also the keys to winning the race.

Why America is Winning the AI Arms Race

As it turns out, being the first company to release a product does give you an upper-head against competitors. Such is the case for OpenAI's ChatGPT which certainly suffered a blow upon the release of DeepSeek AI, but already, only two months later, has everyone is talking about ChatGPT 4o and no one is talking about DeepSeek.

If the brand didn't have a head start and unshakable creativity, perhaps DeepSeek would've been able to steal the throne. Still, some journalists think the West is losing the AI race, but given the current culture position of ChatGPT, the answer is clear to me.

We can speculate the many reasons why people see American AI systems are more desirable than DeepSeek, which does have its benefits, but in short, it comes down to culture.

Other countries place a high value on American trends and innovation. More recently, seeing the internet go wild for ChatGPT's Studio Ghilbi generations shows a level of organic virality that DeepSeek simply can't replicate.

World War II was fought with bullets and bombs and killed so many people that the world drafted a new contract to avoid brutal conflicts of similar magnitude at all costs. Today, the AI arms race may just be how World War 3 unfolds without a single shot fired, in a cold war where tech companies fight on behalf of governments.

In this case, OpenAI, Microsoft, Google, and Washington DC are collaborators in developing the large language models (LLMS) that are leading the AI arms race and winning the war for the world's future.