"Artificial intelligence is the nuclear weapon of the new era"…U.S.-China tech supremacy rivalry intensifies
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Summary
- The global tech industry said competition in artificial intelligence (AI) is spreading into a military- and security-driven struggle for dominance.
- It said the rise of Chinese AI firms and the DeepSeek case sharply rattled the market capitalization of U.S. and European tech stocks and Nvidia’s corporate value.
- Nadella and Schmidt warned that weakening Europe’s AI competitiveness and insufficient open-source AI investment could increase reliance on Chinese technology.
Leading figures in the global tech industry warned that international competition over artificial intelligence (AI) is spilling over into a struggle for dominance in military and security terms. They said rivalry over AI semiconductors and model development has emerged as a key factor shaping the balance of power between nations.
According to a report by Cryptopolitan on the 20th (local time), Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic, attended the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Switzerland and likened exports of advanced AI chips to trading nuclear weapons. He argued that selling high-performance AI chips to rival states is "like selling nuclear weapons to North Korea," calling for a national-security approach.
Warnings also continued about the speed of China’s AI catch-up. Demis Hassabis, CEO of Google DeepMind, assessed that Chinese companies are narrowing the gap with Western technology leaders faster than expected. He said, "China is no longer one or two years behind at the cutting edge—at most, the gap is about six months," while noting they have not yet demonstrated innovation that breaks past existing limits.
These remarks came after China’s AI firm DeepSeek said it had achieved performance comparable to major U.S. models at far lower cost, jolting markets. At the time, about $1 trillion in market capitalization of U.S. and European tech stocks temporarily evaporated, and Nvidia also saw its corporate value fall by hundreds of billions of dollars.
Concerns were also raised about Europe’s weakening competitiveness. Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft, said Europe’s focus on regulation has come at the expense of fostering globally competitive AI companies. France’s Mistral AI was recently valued at $13.7 billion, but analysts say the gap remains wide compared with OpenAI’s valuation of more than $500 billion.
Eric Schmidt, former CEO of Google, warned that unless Europe scales up investment in open-source AI, it could end up reliant on Chinese technology as the U.S. shifts toward closed models. He said such a trajectory would not be desirable for Europe.
Concerns were also voiced about the economic shock AI could bring. CEO Amodei warned that an unprecedented combination could emerge: rapid GDP growth alongside mass unemployment and an expansion of low-wage work. CEO Hassabis emphasized the need for an international discussion involving philosophers, social scientists, economists and technologists to respond.
