Description
With mainstream US media labeling the early 2025 release of Chinese AI model DeepSeek as a modern-day "Sputnik moment," the characterization of US-China artificial intelligence (AI) competition as an "arms race" has gained widespread currency. While historical arms races were largely driven by public sector actors like DARPA, today's cutting edge defense technology increasingly emerges from partnerships with Silicon Valley and Hangzhou. While scholarship has examined China's civil-military fusion and its implications for US export controls, less attention has been paid to the parallel rise of defense-tech-industrial ecosystems in the United States and its impact on traditional arms racing dynamics. This study investigates how private-public interactions – specifically procurement of AI systems for critical security functions and outsourcing of these functions to private actors – create, exacerbate, and alter US-China AI arms racing dynamics, taking the US as a case study. The proposed research builds on existing arms race scholarship to examine whether the "military-tech-industrial complex" adds a fundamentally new dimension to competitive dynamics. Through in-depth examinations of three prominent US defense technology companies – Palantir, Anduril, and Shield AI – we analyze how these companies discursively construct AI threats to legitimise their provision of critical systems to the public sector, and how these actions shape US-China competition. Drawing on empirical analysis of government contracts, corporate content, and public rhetoric from company leadership, we examine how this shifting relationship between defense technology companies and the public sector impacts geopolitical competition between the US and China, contextualizing our findings within parallel features of China's innovation ecosystem.
