ABSTRACT
The “Artificial Intelligence Development Plan” clearly and repeatedly establishes an explicit connection between artificial intelligence (AI) for economic development and AI for national security. The relationship between free competition in AI industries and the restrictions placed on competition due to Chinese security concerns is a complicated one. Certainly, political leaders are accustomed to proclaiming ambitious targets, especially when long-term time horizons provide a degree of insulation from the potential for failure. It is important to begin with a recognition that Chinese innovation and development policy is very dissimilar from innovation and development policy in other jurisdictions and political-economic systems. China’s political leadership has been inclined to view these recent waves of political instability as not simply as grassroots uprisings emboldened by open access to digital communications, but as disturbances that were deliberately fostered by rival powers using technology companies as surrogates to advance their geopolitical interests.
