Advances in AI and robotics, highlighted by rapid progress in China, are driving a “Robot Revolution” that will reshape work, production, and global power. Countries that lead in developing humanoid robots are poised to gain major economic and strategic advantages.

The success of the Manhattan Project was the result of specific historical conditions. Its model of concentrating resources to achieve a single technological breakthrough doesn’t fit the characteristics and competitive landscape of the AI era.

As geopolitical tensions rise, competition for the cutting-edge science and talent that underpins advanced technology has heated up. The United States, China, and other major powers now regard leadership in areas like AI, semiconductors, quantum technologies, and biotechnology as central to military capability, economic security, and ideological influence.

Advanced technologies, especially artificial intelligence (AI), semiconductors, and quantum computing, have emerged at the heart of most nations’ national strategic planning. China also developed national plans for technological breakthroughs. However, unlike most other countries, China’s current plans are heavily influenced by unprecedented US export curbs on acquiring technology. These steep and targeted export curbs are intended to prevent China from acquiring high technologies to maintain the US monopoly. They started during the first term of US President Donald Trump (2017-2021), continued during the Biden administration, and intensified since Trump’s second term.

The U.S. and China are locked in a new “Battle for the Commanding Heights,” centered not on ideology but on control of critical technologies such as chips, AI, and robotics. While the United States retains major advantages, China’s hybrid model of state guidance and private entrepreneurship gives it powerful momentum, and America risks losing its edge if it underinvests or misreads the competition.

Maintaining peace and stability in Asia and adjacent regions — fostering friendly and cooperative relations — is essential for China’s own security and prosperity. The focus must be on peace, development and building a community with a shared future.

America’s AI Action Plan reveals the close ideological alignment of the Trump administration with the “tech right,” such as permissionless innovation, anti-woke AI and pro-capital innovation culture.

China’s industrial policy, including its “Delete America” initiative and major state investments, has secured dominance in legacy chips and reduced reliance on U.S. technology. While still dependent on American AI chips, Chinese firms like Huawei are quickly developing competitive alternatives, threatening U.S. chipmakers.

The country is steering artificial intelligence toward a more balanced, secure and inclusive development path. In doing so, it is contributing to a global development trajectory that is more intelligent, equitable and sustainable.

In the high-tech center of the world, technology and capital are moving from merely lobbying Washington to reshaping it, a trend that poses ongoing challenges to the structure of political power in the United States.