Inside the Chinese AI threat to security (www.politico.com)

The piece frames U.S. anxiety about China’s rapid AI advance as central to current policy debates — amplified recently by a public spat involving Nvidia’s CEO — and traces how Beijing’s multibillion-dollar push into AI, hardware and infrastructure (plus civil‑military fusion) has prompted tougher U.S. measures from chip tariffs to an AI Action Plan. The concern is twofold: economic dominance in AI commercialization and a diffuse security threat that stretches from cyber operations to ideological influence and strategic stability. Technically, experts warn AI could supercharge state‑linked cyber campaigns (e.g., Volt Typhoon, Salt Typhoon) by automating intrusion, target discovery and disruption of critical infrastructure; Chinese chatbots and platforms (DeepSeek, Baidu’s Ernie, Alibaba’s Qwen) collect user data that—under China’s National Intelligence Law—can be leveraged for espionage or highly targeted disinformation. Other risks include data‑poisoning or trojanized models embedded in military systems that trigger biased or malicious behaviors in crises, and the long‑term danger of an artificial superintelligence tipping strategic balances (including nuclear deterrence). The upshot: the China challenge conflates commercial competition with national security, creating urgent demand for technical guardrails, hardened supply chains, and international norms to manage both near‑term cyber/propaganda threats and far‑term existential risks.