China prioritizing AI with goal of ‘intelligentized warfare,’ Pentagon warns

The Pentagon, in a new report to Congress, is warning that the Chinese are focused on dominating in artificial intelligence in order to probe enemy vulnerabilities and advance the concept of “intelligentized warfare.”

“China is a global leader in AI technology and aims to overtake the West in AI R&D by 2025 to become the world leader in AI by 2030,” the Department of Defense said in its annual report on China’s military power.

“China has designated AI as one of its priority, national-level S&T development areas and assesses that advances in AI and autonomy are central to intelligentized warfare, the PRC’s concept of future warfare,” it says.

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The report is not the first time the U.S. government has warned about foreign adversaries’ use of the technology. Lakshmi Raman, the CIA’s director for artificial intelligence, said at a recent summit  that the agency is watching China’s AI program — with a concern about how it could leverage the technology.

“They are growing every which way,” she said.

 The Department of Homeland Security’s threat assessment said that “the proliferation of “accessible artificial intelligence tools likely will bolster our adversaries’ tactics.”

“Nation-states seeking to undermine trust in our government institutions, social cohesion, and democratic processes are using AI to create more believable mis-, dis-, and malinformation campaigns, while cyber actors use AI to develop new tools and accesses that allow them to compromise more victims and enable larger-scale, faster, efficient, and more evasive cyber attacks,” the assessment said.

But the Pentagon report goes further and says that the communist regime has already established research centers, obtained commercially-developed AI and robotic tech to give the People’s Liberation Army access to “cutting-edge AI technologies.”

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The report says that the Chinese are “world leaders in certain AI applications, such as facial recognition and natural language processing, and Chinese companies are marketing domesticallydesigned AI chips.” 

“While China remains reliant on certain foreign capabilities to produce AI hardware, such as advanced semiconductor fabrication factories and electronic design automation software, Chinese researchers continue to explore new materials and design concepts for next-generation semiconductors,” the report says.

The report also warns that in 2021 the PLA had discussed a concept called “Multi-Domain Precision Warfare” which is intended to use a network incorporating advances in data and AI to identify “key vulnerabilities in the U.S. operational system and then combine joint forces across domains to launch precision strikes against those vulnerabilities.”

There are already indicators that the U.S. is moving to curb China’s edge in the technology, including moves to close loopholes in chip export regulations to restrict shipments of advanced AI chips to Beijing.