How should we understand the US-China AI competition — is it a race, a cold war, a decoupling, or something else?

The US-China AI competition is best understood as a high-stakes race for technological supremacy and national security dominance, with the US viewing it as an existential threat requiring export controls and domestic infrastructure protection [1]. Sources consistently frame it as an "AI race," highlighting China's rapid progress in closing gaps through investments, talent production, and models like DeepSeek that rival US counterparts from OpenAI and Google, though the US maintains leads in model capability, innovation, and compute capacity [2][4][5][9][10][11]. While not explicitly a "cold war," the rivalry involves strategic battles over global influence, such as AI investments in Africa and differing approaches (e.g., China's open-source models vs. US closed-source), potentially leading to decoupling via restrictions [1][7][8]. Elements of broader geopolitical tension appear, with China leveraging AI to bolster its authoritarian model as an alternative to the US's chaotic democracy [3].