Artificial intelligence policy keeps colliding with national security as U.S. leaders debate how fast the technology should advance. J. Michael Waller, senior analyst for strategy at the Center for Security Policy, says the larger concern is geopolitical, warning that the U.S. is locked in a race with the Chinese Communist Party that will shape global power and technological standards.
According to Waller, AI is an inflection point with unpredictable consequences. “It is a human civilization changing time,” he says. “We just don’t know where it’s going to go.” He argues the U.S. helped empower China through trade-era assumptions. “It’s been worse than a complete failure,” he says. “What we’ve done is passed all our technology to China… [they] come and spy on us and steal tens of trillions of dollars worth of our intellectual property.”
China’s system, he says, permits innovation inside political limits. “The Chinese Communist Party allows freedom of thought in the technology sphere… as long as it furthers the goals of the party,” he says. He calls for broader countermeasures. “It should be a whole of government response,” he says, arguing Washington cannot rely on “an FBI fly swatting operation.” He also claims Chinese citizens abroad face legal and familial coercion: “You can’t be a citizen of the People’s Republic of China unless you spy when told to… It’s part of their law.”
Waller says adversaries exploit social fractures and institutions. “Any smart adversary would do whatever they could to get us to undermine ourselves.” He points to a strategy he calls “quadratic development,” arguing influence multiplies when activists “teach the teachers,” and he claims Soviet-linked efforts targeted teacher training programs to spread “cultural Marxism.”
The most dangerous front, Waller argues, involves standards and psychological manipulation. China’s planning, he says, aims “to have AI dominant by the year 2030,” which would let Beijing set “the industrial standards, the technical standards, the logic” used worldwide. “Imagine having Chinese Communist Party logic and ethics governing AI that we all use in our everyday lives. He warns conversational AI can become a tool for shaping behavior because people “start to confide in AI and treat it as a human friend,” which becomes more potent once embedded in toys, games, and youth culture.
Waller also highlights data extraction. He cites his report “The Code and Country,” claiming Chinese-linked apps collect brainwave data through headbands, sending it “back to servers in China,” where the Chinese military uses it “to train its humanoid AI powered robots,” including training drawn from elite athletes. He argues China leads in industrial application with drones, autonomous drones, and humanoid robots, and says the U.S. faces an energy constraint. “We’re not building any nuclear plants right now,” he says, while “China’s building them like crazy.”
Waller opposes sweeping domestic restrictions on innovation but argues legal slowdowns can become strategic self-sabotage. “Every lawsuit to challenge our AI development means holding our development back and allowing the Chinese regime to win,” he says. “There isn’t a strategy on dealing with China,” and the country is “being ripped off at every turn.”
