Since escalation in the Middle East began, some analysts have argued that China is emerging as an indirect winner in the broader geopolitical ripple effects.
Beijing’s electric vehicle industry is raking in revenue as gas prices soar while Chinese leaders have been shrewdly playing peacemaker.
But there is another, quieter way China is capitalizing on the moment.
According to the Washington Post, Chinese companies have “been marrying artificial intelligence with open-source data to market information” to map and track US military movements in the Middle East.
US officials are reportedly divided over just how much of a threat this is. But it underscores a broader point: beyond any single conflict, the United States still faces a technologically sophisticated rival in China. And that adversary is determined to leverage AI to gain a military advantage.
AI Is Becoming a Tool of Battlefield Visibility
Since Xi Jinping began positioning China as a global competitor to the United States, he has faced a familiar constraint. His country is resource-rich and has far more people than the US, but its military and many of its key industries have lagged behind.
Beijing has taken a number of efforts to close this gap. For example, to help bring its industries up to par with the US, it has engaged in industrial espionage and technology transfer efforts. This has allowed it to “leapfrog up global value chains relatively quickly,” as one analyst has put it.
Another, more important layer is artificial intelligence — and specifically the attempt to embed it directly into military doctrine rather than treat it as a standalone capability.
This thinking has been developing for years. As early as 2011, the official People’s Liberation Army dictionary included an entry for “AI weapon.” By 2019, China had officially codified the idea of “intelligentized warfare,” meaning warfare driven by AI.
That same year, the US Department of Defense warned that Chinese defense manufacturers were already marketing drones capable of full autonomy.
Since then, the Pentagon has repeatedly signalled concern over the speed at which the PLA is integrating AI into operational concepts, and has leaned on the private sector for support in countering it.
China’s Structural Advantage in Military AI
Part of China’s advantage is structural. The US benefits from a world-leading private-sector AI ecosystem, but that ecosystem does not always align neatly with defense needs.
Talent gravitates toward commercial firms, and parts of the tech sector remain wary of direct military involvement. China does not face the same institutional divide between civilian and military innovation.
At the same time, it would be wrong to suggest Beijing is racing ahead without constraint.
There have been concerns in China about job losses. Chinese regulators have introduced AI governance frameworks requiring ethics reviews that will “focus on human well-being, fairness and justice, and controllability and trustworthiness,” according to their guidelines.
But even allowing for some limits, Beijing still intends to win the AI arms race against the US and build a sophisticated military of the future.
Operationally, China is investing heavily in unmanned combat systems, autonomous platforms, AI-enabled drone swarms, and decision-support tools designed to accelerate command and control.
The last element is particularly significant. The United States still holds a major advantage in institutional experience and operational learning. China’s ambition is to use AI to compress that advantage — effectively “intelligentizing” decision-making so that battlefield judgments can be made faster, with more data, and at greater scale.
AI on the Battlefield Is Already Real
In practice, AI-supported warfare is already a reality, with AI used in conflicts such as Ukraine and by the US in Iran.
Meanwhile, China, which stayed out of both conflicts, isn’t suffering the same ordnance depletions while carefully studying events to determine how AI can work in future wars.
If the United States wants to remain the most capable military power, it will need to beat China at the algorithmic level. Winning that race will depend on the underlying infrastructure, including secure networks, high-performance computing, and AI-ready systems that can operate at scale.
This is where the competition increasingly shifts from software to systems.
Recent consolidation in US networking, particularly a merger between tech companies Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) and Juniper Networks, and cloud infrastructure reflects an attempt to build scale in secure, AI-ready systems. It also points to a broader concern: whether the United States can match China’s ability to align state priorities with industrial execution.
On the other side, firms like Huawei remain central to China’s global technology footprint, particularly in telecommunications and network infrastructure. That matters because military AI is not just about algorithms; it depends on the underlying data pipelines, compute capacity, and communications architecture that carry them.
The Pentagon has already classified Huawei as a Chinese military-linked company, underscoring how blurred the line between commercial and strategic infrastructure has become.
Washington is responding. Initiatives such as Project Maven, which uses AI to support intelligence and targeting, are already embedded in parts of the US defense system. At the same time, the Pentagon has tried to reduce bureaucratic friction around AI adoption in an effort to speed up integration.
The US, with its immense talent pool and decades-long head start, can still win the AI arms race. But it needs to be fully aware of what China is doing and respond accordingly.
Rob Joyce is former director of Cybersecurity for the National Security Agency, former acting Homeland Security Advisor, and former assistant to the president on the US National Security Council.
The views and opinions expressed here are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial position of Military AI.
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