Written by Paul Scharr, Four Battlegrounds: Power in the Age of Artificial Intelligence studies the competitive global race to dominate the future of artificial intelligence (AI), especially its use in military and defense technologies.
The book portrays a vivid picture of how AI has become the new frontier of geopolitical competition, mainly focusing on the rivalry between the United States, China and Russia. Scharre structures the analysis through several lenses, focusing on key “battlegrounds” such as data, compute, talent, and institutions—critical components that will shape the future of AI. It is one of the 10 best AI books I have reviewed.
Yet, along with the four “battlegrounds” such as data, compute, talent, and institutions, I found the themes of technological authoritarianism/totalitarianism/autocratic surveillance through AI, misuse of AI in manipulation, disinformation, misinformation and control the geopolitical landscape.
Each of these elements represents an essential factor in determining which nations will succeed in leveraging AI for military, economic, and political power. Scharre argues that nations excelling in these areas, data, compute, talent, and institutions, will have a substantial advantage in shaping the future of AI and global power dynamics.
Four Battlegrounds
Data
Scharre says “Technology is an enabler of both hard (economic and military) and soft(culture and values) power. Many experts have suggested that AI, like earlier general-purpose technologies, could cause changes on the scale of another industrial revolution.
“As the AI revolution unfolds, which countries will benefit the most, and what digital elements will become key determinants of national power, like coal, steel, and oil did during the Industrial Revolution?” Asks, Scharre.
The first and second industrial revolutions saw nations rise and fall on the world stage based on how rapidly and effectively they adopted industrial technology. By the time the second industrial revolution ended in the early twentieth century, the world order and even the key building blocks of national power had been transformed
Scharre begins with data and emphasises that “The world’s most valuable resource is no longer oil, but data”, which he describes as the fuel for AI. In machine learning, data is essential for training models that can recognize patterns, make decisions, and learn from experiences.
The more data a country can generate, control, and refine, the greater its potential to build sophisticated AI systems. Nations like China, which has with an estimated 900 million internet users as of 2020, in India, has roughly 750 million internet users in 2020 and the United States have a notable advantage here because of the vast amount of data collected from their massive population and their government’s relatively lax data privacy regulations. The U.S., that has 290 million internet users while UE collectively has around 400 million users, also collects substantial amounts of data, though its privacy laws and public resistance to surveillance limit its reach compared to China.
China and India have an even higher internet user potential than Europe and the United States simply by virtue of their larger populations: roughly 1.4 billion for China and India each compared to just under 450 million in the European Union and 330 million in the United States. More people mean more data, Scharre notes.
Data is increasingly likened to the “new oil” because of its role as a raw resource in the digital economy. However, Scharre points out that data is not a perfectly fungible resource like oil; it is task-specific.
A nation may have vast amounts of data in one domain, such as facial recognition, but that data may not easily transfer to other AI applications, like autonomous drones or financial systems.
Therefore, while having vast datasets is critical, the ability to effectively use that data across multiple AI applications is where nations can secure a strategic edge.
Compute
The second battleground is computing power, often referred to as “compute.” Compute refers to the processing power needed to train AI models on vast datasets and to perform inference once the models are trained.
Scharre emphasizes that access to high-performance computing hardware is a key determinant of AI success, especially as AI models become more complex and require exponentially greater amounts of compute.
This battleground is highly concentrated in a few countries and companies. The U.S. leads in developing and designing cutting-edge AI chips through companies like NVIDIA and Intel.
However, Taiwan, with its Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC), plays a disproportionately large role in producing advanced semiconductors, particularly the most cutting-edge AI chips. China, though a global leader in tech manufacturing, lags significantly in chip design and production, relying heavily on imports.
This dependence on foreign semiconductor technology is a key vulnerability for China, one that the U.S. has exploited by limiting Chinese access to critical chips, as in the case of Huawei.
Scharre argues that compute is often overlooked in discussions about AI, yet it may be the decisive factor in AI competition. The countries that can control the supply of advanced AI chips will control a crucial chokepoint in the global AI ecosystem.
Talent
Talent is the third battleground and refers to the human expertise required to develop and implement AI technologies. AI research and development are driven by skilled scientists, engineers, and researchers, whose expertise determines the quality of AI breakthroughs.
The competition for AI talent is severe, with fresh PhDs reportedly making between $300,000 to $500,000 or more a year in salary and stock options. The U.S. has historically attracted top talent from around the world, including many of the brightest minds from China and India. American universities like MIT and Stanford, along with tech companies like Google and Microsoft, are powerhouses of AI innovation and research.
The Chinese government has long prioritized scientific talent as part of its national competitiveness, and no aspect of international talent flows has drawn more controversy than China’s Thousand Talents Plan. The program offers participants high salaries, bonuses, research funding, lab space, and housing in exchange for bringing their scientific knowledge back to China.
Scharre highlights that “The U.S. government has increased its attention on Chinese talent recruitment programs in recent years as part of a broader effort to crack down on Chinese espionage and intellectual property theft.
The AI talent search in USA ever fiercer. Sacharre puts that “The U.S. National Security Commission called for a new National Defense Education Act… to reinvigorate math and science education. Yet a nation of 330 million people will always be at a disadvantage competing against a nation of China with 1.4 billion if the United States restricts itself to home-grown talent. However, America’s unique advantage in the competition for AI talent is its ability to draw on the best and brightest out of the world’s 8 billion people.
Though, China is improving its domestic education and recruiting foreign scientific knowledge through programs like Thousand Talents, but it cannot cope with with the United States as a global draw for students and entrepreneurs.
Even though China has major weaknesses in compute and talent areas, its government is executing a concerted national approach to increase its science and technology competitiveness, including in AI.
Researchers at Tortoise ranked China second in government strategy behind Canada, followed by Saudi Arabia, Spain, France, Russia, South Korea, and Finland, according to their 2021 Global AI Index. The United States, meanwhile, has massive structural advantages, especially in talent, that it is squandering due to the lack of a coherent national approach. In Tortoise’s government strategy ranking, the United States was seventeenth.
However, China is rapidly catching up in both the quantity and quality of its AI talent. The Chinese government has made AI talent development a national priority, investing heavily in education and incentivizing top researchers to return to China after studying abroad.
Despite these efforts, the U.S. continues to dominate in attracting and retaining the best AI minds globally, largely because of the appeal of its universities, research facilities, and corporate opportunities.
Scharre underscores that talent is one of the most fiercely contested resources in the AI arms race. As demand for AI expertise increases, countries must ensure they can both develop homegrown talent and attract foreign experts. Without the necessary human capital, nations will struggle to compete in AI development.
Institutions
The final battleground is institutions, which include the broader societal and governmental structures that enable or hinder AI development.
This encompasses everything from government policies, R&D funding, and public-private partnerships to regulatory environments and societal attitudes toward AI. Institutions are critical because they shape how quickly and effectively AI technologies can be developed, tested, and implemented.
The U.S. leads in fostering an innovation-friendly environment through its open market economy, vibrant tech sector, and historically high levels of government R&D funding.
The creation of agencies like DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) and the Joint AI Center reflects the Pentagon’s efforts to streamline AI development for national security purposes. Using new technologies is the bread and butter of what the U.S. military does. The U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) has created a number of organizational innovations to bring commercial technology into the military, including the Defense Innovation Unit (DIU), Joint AI Center, and Project Maven.
However, the U.S. also faces significant internal challenges, such as resistance to government surveillance and ethical concerns about militarized AI, which can slow down adoption.
China, by contrast, has fewer internal barriers. Its “military-civil fusion” strategy allows the government to rapidly deploy commercial AI technologies for military purposes.
Scharre describes that “The United States isn’t the only country working hard to spin-in AI technology to the military. China has similarly been investing in new institutions and organizations that will allow it to move faster and adopt commercial technology. It has adopted DARPA-style competitions, such as an “Intelligent UAV Swarm System Challenge,” and even a DIU-like unit. In 2018, the country’s Central Military Commission Science and Technology Commission, an organization roughly analogous to DARPA, launched a “rapid response small group” in Shenzhen “to use advanced commercial technologies to serve the military.” Some Chinese reporting even referred to the group as “China’s DIUx.”
The results of Chinese investments in technology are the “national team” of AI leaders: Baidu, Alibaba, Tencent, SenseTime, and iFLYTEK, the top-tier global AI companies. Scharre writes that, AI is only one of several high technology areas in which China is now in a position of rough parity or ahead of the United States, including quantum technology, 5G wireless networking, and genomics.
China has emerged as a technological powerhouse and is translating that technology leadership into military advances, such as the “intelligentization” of its military forces. China’s vision of “intelligentized” warfare envisions combat with intelligent weapons, equipment, platforms, decision-making, and logistics enabled by AI, communications networks, big data, cloud computing, and IoT devices”.
The Chinese government is also willing to use AI for widespread surveillance and internal control, exemplified by its development of facial recognition systems and social credit initiatives. This gives China a strategic advantage in applying AI technologies at scale, although it comes with significant ethical concerns about authoritarianism and human rights abuses.
AI Tech Rivalry Of USA, China and Russia
China vs. USA
Scharre emphasizes that the U.S. and China are the principal competitors in the global AI race, with China making rapid strides to close the gap with the U.S. Both countries are investing heavily in AI research, development, and applications, particularly for military purposes.
China is advancing rapidly, particularly in AI-driven surveillance technologies, which it uses both domestically for internal control and externally to sell to other authoritarian regimes, expanding its influence globally.
Scharre delves into how AI is revolutionizing warfare, comparing it to previous transformative technologies like nuclear weapons and the Industrial Revolution.
He argues that the global competition is so intense that nations may cut corners in terms of testing and safety regulations to gain an edge, which could lead to dangerous outcomes in military AI applications. This competition could trigger an arms race in autonomous weapons systems, which could lead to devastating consequences if not properly regulated.
He highlights that unlike nuclear technology, which is scarce and highly regulated, AI proliferates rapidly across industries, resulting in a global AI arms race. This race is led by the U.S. and China, with China aggressively pushing to become the global leader by 2030 through massive investments in research and development (R&D) and a national-level AI plan.
The competition extends across multiple dimensions: AI research, talent acquisition, R&D funding, and integration of AI into national security strategies.
The book underscores the growing militarization of AI, where nations, particularly the U.S. and China, are increasingly focusing on AI-enabled systems for military use. The U.S. Department of Defense, through agencies like DARPA, is experimenting with AI in defense systems such as autonomous drones and cyber defenses.
Scharre examines how both the U.S. and China are investing billions into AI R&D. U.S. tech companies like Google and Microsoft lead in AI research, while China is not far behind with companies like Baidu and Tencent.
Interestingly, China’s model of “military-civil fusion,” where research and commercial technologies seamlessly feed into military applications, gives it a strategic edge. The U.S. struggles with this integration due to private sector reluctance to collaborate with defense projects, as seen with Google’s Project Maven fallout.
As discussed above, one of the key “Battlegrounds” discussed is the competition for AI talent. The U.S. continues to attract the brightest minds from around the world, including China, but China is rapidly catching up, producing a large number of AI experts domestically.
The talent gap is narrowing, and Scharre warns that this could shift the balance of power in the long term, particularly if China succeeds in retaining its talent and applying it to both civilian and military technologies.
“Fears of Soviet technological dominance propelled the United States to create NASA and the Advanced Research Projects Agency (the precursor to DARPA), launch the space race, and sparked a wave of federal R&D spending that paid dividends for decades.”
China’s Strategic AI Ambitions
China has outlined its ambition to become the world leader in AI by 2030, and the government has backed this goal with substantial funding and national policies. One of China’s strategic advantages is its vast amount of data, largely due to its massive population and the government’s extensive surveillance system. This data fuels AI advancements, particularly in areas like facial recognition and autonomous systems.
The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has integrated AI development into its broader plan for “military-civil fusion,” where private sector innovations are quickly adapted for military use. Chinese companies like Baidu, Alibaba, and Tencent are global leaders in AI research and applications, and the Chinese government’s willingness to use AI for surveillance and repression gives it a distinct edge in rapidly implementing AI technologies.
Scharre highlights that while China historically relied on technology transfer from Western countries (through both legitimate and illegitimate means, such as intellectual property theft), it has now become a formidable force in its own right. China’s AI research is rapidly improving in both quality and quantity. For example, it publishes more AI papers than the U.S., and by 2025, it is expected to surpass the U.S. in the number of highly-cited AI papers.
However, Scharre also points out that China has vulnerabilities, particularly its dependency on foreign semiconductors and advanced chips, where the U.S. remains dominant. China’s reliance on Taiwan for semiconductor manufacturing creates a strategic weakness, as Taiwan is a key U.S. ally in this sector. This dependence is a significant factor in the U.S.-China rivalry, with the U.S. using export controls to limit China’s access to critical chip technology, as seen in the sanctions on Huawei.
The United States‘ Position
The U.S. remains the global leader in AI, largely due to its innovative tech ecosystem, world-class universities, and significant military investments in AI R&D. American companies like Google, Microsoft, and Amazon lead in AI research, and the U.S. government has recognized the importance of AI for national security. Agencies like DARPA and the Joint AI Center are working to integrate AI into defense systems, while the Pentagon’s partnership with Silicon Valley aims to keep the U.S. at the forefront of AI military applications.
Scharre notes that the U.S. holds a key advantage in talent. Top AI researchers from around the world, including China, are drawn to American universities and tech companies. However, the U.S. faces challenges in retaining this talent as immigration restrictions and political tensions with China increase.
One of the U.S.’s core strengths is its advanced semiconductor industry, particularly companies like NVIDIA, Intel, and AMD, which lead in designing AI-specific chips. These chips are essential for training complex AI models and running AI applications. Control over this technology gives the U.S. a critical advantage in the global AI race, but the competition remains fierce as China works to develop its own semiconductor capabilities.
Russia’s Role in the Tech Rivalry
While the competition between China and the U.S. dominates the global AI race, Russia also plays a significant, though more limited, role. Scharre highlights that Russia’s approach to AI is heavily focused on military applications, particularly in areas like autonomous weapons, cybersecurity, and disinformation.
Russia’s AI ambitions are largely driven by its military strategy, which prioritizes the development of autonomous systems, AI-enhanced weapons, and cyber capabilities. Russian President Vladimir Putin has famously stated that whoever leads in AI will “become the ruler of the world,” signaling Russia’s intent to be a major player in AI-driven warfare.
Russia’s strengths lie in its use of AI for information warfare and cyber operations. It has effectively used AI and machine learning to enhance its cyber capabilities, including the use of bots and AI-generated disinformation in its efforts to influence global politics. Russian cyberattacks and disinformation campaigns during the U.S. elections and its role in global propaganda efforts are examples of how Russia leverages AI for asymmetric warfare.
Despite its military ambitions, Russia lags behind both the U.S. and China in broader AI development. Russia’s tech sector is smaller, and it lacks the same level of private sector innovation or access to global AI talent that characterizes the U.S. and China. Russia also faces economic challenges that limit its ability to invest heavily in AI research and development. Its AI ecosystem is not as globally integrated, and much of its focus remains on military rather than commercial AI applications.
However, Scharre warns that Russia’s strategic use of AI in disinformation and hybrid warfare cannot be underestimated. Russia’s willingness to use AI technologies for destabilizing and disruptive purposes makes it a dangerous player in the global AI race, even if its capabilities are not as broad or advanced as those of the U.S. or China.
Scharre argues that whichever nation gains dominance in AI will not only lead in military power but will also shape the future of global economic and political systems. The stakes are extraordinarily high, and the race is not just about developing superior technology but about who will control the future of warfare, surveillance, and global influence in the age of AI.
In Four Battlegrounds: Power in the Age of Artificial Intelligence, Paul Scharre argues that technologically advanced nations will rule the world because of the pivotal role technology, particularly artificial intelligence (AI), plays in determining global power dynamics.
Scharre draws parallels between previous technological revolutions and the current rise of AI, emphasizing that the nations that lead in AI development and deployment will control the future of military power, economic influence, and geopolitical dominance.
Several key reasons are outlined in the book as to why technologically advanced nations are likely to rule the world.
Major Socioeconomic and Geopolitical Implications of AI
AI as a General-Purpose Technology
Scharre points out that AI, like electricity or the internal combustion engine, is a general-purpose technology that affects nearly every aspect of modern life—military, economic, and social systems.
Countries that excel in AI will have the ability to influence everything from automation and productivity to national security. AI’s wide-ranging applications mean that the country or countries leading in AI innovation will not only hold technological superiority but will shape the very rules of the global order.
AI is unique in its potential to enhance cognitive tasks. Unlike earlier technologies that primarily amplified human physical strength (such as machines during the Industrial Revolution), AI amplifies human intelligence, decision-making, and strategic planning.
This gives technologically advanced nations a transformative tool, allowing them to outcompete others in areas ranging from defense to economic development.
Military Superiority through AI-Enhanced Warfare
Scharre’s point is that the military implications of AI as one of the strongest reasons why technologically advanced nations will rule the world.
He draws attention to how AI is transforming modern warfare, particularly in areas like autonomous weapons, cybersecurity, surveillance, and battlefield decision-making. AI-powered military systems, such as autonomous drones, robotic vehicles, and AI-enhanced command centers, provide decisive advantages on the battlefield by speeding up response times, improving precision, and reducing human error.
The concept of “battlefield singularity,” which Scharre discusses, underscores the point that warfare may eventually move too quickly for human decision-makers to control.
In his own words: “AI’s ability to imbue military forces with greater situational awareness, precision, coordination, and speed is likely to result in a battlefield that is faster paced, more transparent, and more lethal. The ability of AI systems to process large amounts of information and take in the totality of action is likely to make it increasingly difficult for military forces to hide, placing a premium on camouflage, deception, and decoys. New tactics will be needed as a result”.
In such a scenario, nations that lead in AI-enhanced warfare will have a decisive edge over competitors. For instance, Scharre references the success of AI in DARPA’s AlphaDogfight trials, where AI outperformed experienced human fighter pilots in air combat simulations.
These kinds of advancements suggest that the nation that perfects AI for military use will dominate future conflicts and, by extension, the global balance of power.
Economic Dominance through Technological Innovation
Scharre wites citing Russian President Vladimir Putin saying, “whoever leads in AI will become the ruler of the world”, mean to say that technologically advanced nations will also rule the world because of their ability to drive economic growth through AI. Scharre argues that AI will fundamentally change the global economy by enabling automation on an extraordinary scale.
Nations that lead in AI research and deployment will see huge gains in productivity, creating more efficient industries, services, and logistics systems.
Scharre notes that AI can replace or augment human labor in key industries, including manufacturing, healthcare, finance, and transportation. Nations that can effectively harness AI to boost productivity will dominate global markets, control key industries, and set international trade standards. As seen in the past, technological revolutions like the Industrial Revolution not only increased national wealth but also shifted global power structures.
Similarly, AI promises to create new economic superpowers, with technologically advanced nations reaping the majority of the benefits.
Additionally, control over critical technologies such as semiconductors and AI algorithms will ensure that technologically advanced nations dictate the terms of the global economy. As Scharre highlights, whoever controls the important technologies underlying AI systems will have immense power over the global supply chain.
Geopolitical Power and Strategic Alliances
Technologically advanced nations will also have the ability to shape global alliances and influence geopolitics through their leadership in AI. Scharre points out that the U.S. and China are locked in a fierce competition for technological supremacy, and the outcome of this competition will determine the future of global power dynamics. As nations align themselves with either the U.S. or China based on technological and economic dependencies, the world will increasingly be divided into spheres of influence based on AI capabilities.
Shcharre expounds “The emerging geopolitical rivalry between the United States and China coincided with the AI revolution, such that Chinese progress in AI was viewed suspiciously in Washington and vice versa. At the tail end of the Obama administration, the White House released a series of policy documents outlining the importance of AI. While falling short of a coherent national strategy for AI, the three White House documents released in late 2016 nevertheless highlighted AI as a critical area for the economy and laid out government R&D priorities. China took notice, and in July 2017 released its own signature AI strategy, the “New Generation Artificial Intelligence Development Plan.”
Technologically advanced nations will also have the power to wield sanctions, control access to critical technologies, and influence global trade. The U.S., for instance, has already used export controls to limit China’s access to high-tech semiconductors and AI components, as seen in the case of Huawei. This ability to control who can access key technologies will be a crucial tool in global diplomacy and power projection.
Authoritarianism: Control Over Global Governance
Debate over freedom vs. security is a longstanding one. Some prefer freedom over security while others are ready to sacrifice freedom in order to make like secure. Due to ever presence of artificial intelligence elements the lives of people have become secure albeit at the high price of freedom.
Scharre dedicates one chapter, Repression, of Four Battlegrounds to the technological repression of authoritarian regime, like China. Let us observe what Scharre notes on how Chinese government is using AI to control its citizens and other nations are following its suite.
Brutal campaign of the Chinese government to destroy Uighur culture and way of life, including forced sterilizations and abortions has led many independent experts to declare the government’s campaign a genocide. The Chinese government has imprisoned over one million Uighurs, split children from their families, and built a dense web of physical and electronic surveillance to monitor Uighurs’ behavior.
Under the “Strike Hard Campaign,” the Chinese government has established thousands of police checkpoints across Xinjiang and deployed 160,000 cameras in the capital city, Ürümqi, to monitor every aspect of citizens’ movements.
AI is helping to enable this repression through tools such as face, voice, and gait recognition. It is being used by dictators not just in Xinjiang but around the world to erode liberties. Facial recognition is even being used to shame jaywalkers, displaying their name, phone numbers, and government ID numbers on billboards.
The fully realized vision of China’s surveillance state is truly horrifying. AI will, over time, enable comprehensive automated surveillance that monitors people at every turn, analyzes and predicts their behavior, and cues any “unusual” activity to authorities. AI will be used not just to identify the faces of protestors, but to identify would-be dissidents before they even begin to step out of line. In a world where improperly sorting the trash is met with draconian punishment, few will even consider standing up against the regime. In a world where even coded messages are censored, how will dissenters organize?
Technology is used at every turn to augment surveillance. Wi-Fi “sniffers” gather data from nearby phones and computers. Chinese authorities have placed QR codes on peoples’ homes, giving visiting authorities instant access to information about the residents. In some areas, kitchen knives are stamped with QR codes to track their ownership.
While Xinjiang has the most intensive surveillance in China (or anywhere in the world), the government’s mass surveillance architecture exists in every major Chinese city, a system known as Xinjiang-ification of China.
China’s rise and global leadership in AI threatens human rights not just in Xinjiang, but across the globe as China matures AI technology and influences global norms for its use. Eighteen of the top twenty most surveilled cities in the world are in China, along with over half of the estimated 1 billion surveillance cameras in use worldwide in 2021.
While U.S. firms may decline government contracts for ethical reasons, American policymakers fear Chinese companies must serve the demands of the CCP. The Chinese government has sweeping power to compel individuals and organizations to support the state. The Chinese government can compel firms to take certain actions, such as giving the government data on their customers.
The goal is “social governance,” to shape the behavior of 1.4 billion people so there is never a threat to the regime. “Social governance,” also referred to as “social management,” is a CCP process of solving economic and social problems by exerting political control through the day-to-day economic and social interactions of Chinese citizens.
Individuals can have points subtracted from their score or be blacklisted for eating or playing loud music on the train, running a red light, failing to show up to restaurant reservations, not leashing one’s dog in public, not properly sorting trash and recycling, and (of course) jaywalking. “It’s about shaping and managing behaviors,” Hoffman said.
They have constructed a Great Firewall to keep out the destabilizing forces of free information on the internet.
Chinese Communist Party is building a world where there will never be another Tiananmen Square protest, because the protestors will never even make it to the square. The spread of AI surveillance technologies has the potential to tilt the global balance between freedom and authoritarianism.
With the help of AI The CCP is building a new techno-dystopian state that enables an omnipresent surveillance and automated punishment the way Orwell’s 1984 never imagined, which is already to a lesser degree across all of China. Perhaps most alarmingly, automation will allow authorities to deploy these tools at scale, decoupling autocratic regimes from the need to maintain even a sizeable minority on their side to repress the masses.
These developments are not just a threat to Chinese citizens; they threaten global freedoms as well. China is also exporting its technology, laws, and norms of surveillance to other nations around the world. China’s model of digital authoritarianism is going global. Chinese surveillance and policing technology is now in use in at least eighty countries around globe and on every continent except Australia. According to Carnegie’s AI Global Surveillance Index, 51 percent of advanced democracies use AI surveillance systems.
According to Huawei, its safe city technology has been applied in “700 cities across more than 100 countries,” including Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Côte d’Ivoire, Kenya, Mexico, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Serbia, Singapore, South Africa, Spain, Thailand, and Turkey. While Huawei has not publicly provided a list of all 100 countries, news reports indicate additional countries with Huawei safe city projects include Angola, Azerbaijan, France, Germany, Italy, Kazakhstan, Laos, Russia, Turkey, Uganda, and Ukraine. According to Huawei, over 1 billion people are served by its safe city technology.
In Tanzania, Uganda, and Vietnam, restrictive media and cybersecurity laws closely followed Chinese engagement. Zimbabwe’s government, whose officials attended Chinese seminars, has pushed for a sweeping cybersecurity law that would strengthen surveillance and clamp down on internet freedoms.
While the global spread of Chinese technology helps China gain access to new datasets as well as inroads for spying abroad, it is the social “software” of laws and policies that help China export its evolving model of high-tech authoritarianism.
The proliferation of Chinese-style state surveillance is due to a number of factors. First among these is the desire of Chinese companies to make money and the international demand for surveillance networks. Autocratic regimes looking to secure power at home may view China’s model of digital authoritarianism favorably, but they are not alone in desiring greater surveillance.
A cornerstone of China’s international engagement is the Belt and Road Initiative, launched in 2013, which consists of investments in building ports, railways, highways, energy pipelines, and digital infrastructure projects across Asia, Africa, and Europe.
The Digital Silk Road is the digital tech component of Belt and Road, encompassing technologies such as AI, safe cities, cloud computing, 5G wireless networks, and other “smart city” initiatives to help build modern, connected urban areas.
The motivation for these efforts is expanding China’s political and economic influence, and part of doing so is exporting China’s model of governance.
China’s export of surveillance technology helps to normalize its own model of techno-authoritarianism.
Since the mid-2000s, the world has been experiencing a “wave of autocratization,” with authoritarian leaders tightening their grip and democracies experiencing “democratic backsliding,” such as reducing checks on executive authority. These trends have been seen in countries as diverse as Brazil, Burundi, Hungary, India, Russia, Serbia, Turkey, and Venezuela. Part of this trend has been the rise of “digital dictators,” who use social media, censorship, surveillance, and other digital tools to control the media, repress the population, and spread regime propaganda.
China is not foisting their model on an unwilling world. Many countries are all too happy to emulate China’s example of how to suppress freedoms and tighten control over their population.
In democratic nations, choices about how to use AI-enabled surveillance technology such as facial, voice, or gait recognition are made through a dynamic interplay between citizens, the government, the media, and civil society.
China has instead of “rule of Law” a system of “rule by law” a where CCP (Chinese Communist Party) stands above the law, and the law exists to aid the Party in governing. The spread of China’s model of techno-authoritarianism is a grave risk to global freedom.
As the U.S. government’s restrictions on Huawei reveal, control over chip production is a major source of geopolitical power. The U.S. government has historically sought to keep China at least two generations behind in chip manufacturing through export controls.
Xi Jinping’s efforts to rein in China’s tech companies is likely to have a chilling effect on innovation in China’s commercial tech environment, but the CCP has balanced technology innovation and political control for several decades successfully. While there are tensions between these goals, the CCP has managed to grow world-class technology companies even while building a highly effective censorship and propaganda apparatus for controlling information inside China through Great Firewall, mirroring the action of the Great Wall.
What happens in Xinjiang has bearing on us all. The techno-authoritarian techniques that the Chinese government is developing in Xinjiang are being replicated not only across China, but around the world.
Over the long run, the unchecked use of AI for domestic surveillance could help tilt the global balance away from democracies toward authoritarian states, undermining human freedom. With AI it will be easy to wipe out anyone with a differing ideology, any race, or ethnicity that authority feels unsafe or doesn’t like.
Misuse of AI in Mis/Disinformation Synthetic media
Scharre anticipates how the grim future for media and journalism when AI will dominate them extremely. In that not-so-distant future humanity may not be able to distinguish synthetic fake contents from real one. However, he throws, the most important question and answer to me in the who book: “What is real?” The answer: “That which is irreplaceable”.
He adds, that synthetic media is a far cry from building physical androids that can pass as humans like in the Westworld TV series, but audiovisual content will only get better over time to match the reality. Future advances in synthetic media will require an ever-shifting search for what remains irreplaceable—what cannot be synthesized and faked. Yet that line is likely to shift over time, and it isn’t clear in the long run what will be left.
Fake detectors can help for a while but synthetic media will become good enough to fool the detectors as well, ultimately. Once the detectors can be beaten, society will have to turn to other approaches to differentiate what is fake and what is real.
Malicious actors will be able to train their own machine-learning systems to create fake media with misleading watermarks, as deepfake technology becomes more reachable. Ensuring a reliable information environment will depend critically, however, on who controls the information environment . . . and the algorithms they use. The choices these companies make—and the algorithms they use to manage content—have huge consequences for how billions of people see the world.
The information ecosystem has always been a geopolitical battlefield among nations, and it is one increasingly fought using AI. Authoritarian or controlling states hawk disinformation and propaganda to hide the truth and promote untrue/false narratives. AI is giving malicious actors new prospects to spread lies and suppress the truth.
Now malicious actor could release a fake video or audio clip of a politician doing or saying something that might sway an election, or worse, authorize a bad policy or military attack.
Manipulated media threatens not just elections, but one of the core pillars of free societies: the truth. Nevertheless, security researchers began to worry about numerous misuses of AI-generated audio and video, from increasingly realistic robocalls to fake videos that could be used to influence an election which do not just pose the risk for fueling greater online harassment or spam; it could actually be a weapon of statecraft to spread lies and destabilize democracies.
Researchers at the Middlebury Institute’s Center on Terrorism, Extremism, and Counterterrorism established that GPT-2 (now 4) could be adjusted to produce white supremacist, Islamist jihadist, anarchist, or Marxist-Leninist propaganda. They conclude that advanced language models like GPT-2 “pose a significant and novel threat to civil society” by giving fanatics a tool for “drastically scaling up propaganda efforts.
Researchers at Cornell University and the nonprofit Politiwatch found that the full-size GPT-2 model could be used to generate fake news that “readers perceived . . . to be as credible as an original human-written news article” on the same topic. Additionally, they found that readers were as willing to share GPT-2 generated articles as a real New York Times article. The researchers concluded that “Large-scale synthesized disinformation is now possible. When such content floods the Internet, people may come to discount everything they read.”
The geopolitical risks from deepfakes extend beyond manipulating elections. Scharre predicts that the fake audio or video could be used to manufacture a political crisis, destabilise relations between allies, or inflame geopolitical tensions. Even a fake audio/video clip that was eventually proven to be duplicitous could be detrimental if it caused doubt for a period of time.
Moving ahead, “We will not be able to certify that something is authentic just with our senses.” We will need to rely on machines to verify genuineness. Machine learning can now digitally swap a person’s vocal cords, it will be able to apply a synthetic accent to speech with a short enough delay to be unnoticeable.
As China’s rise as a technological superpower poses a challenge to the current U.S.-led global order, Scharre warns that China’s use of AI for authoritarian purposes—such as its extensive surveillance state and social credit system—could set a dangerous precedent if it becomes the global model for AI governance. If China becomes the dominant AI power, it could export its techno-authoritarianism to other countries, eroding democratic freedoms and reshaping international norms.
The global competition for AI leadership is not just about technological superiority; it is also about values and governance. Democracies like the United States must work together to lead in AI to ensure that AI technologies are used to protect freedoms and promote transparency, rather than to empower authoritarian regimes.
Personal Reflections:
Having read the book, what struck me was the depth with which Scharre connects technological advances to global power dynamics. His argument that AI will reshape the balance of power as profoundly as previous industrial revolutions feels both urgent and realistic. The implications of AI dominance are not limited to military superiority but extend into economic, cultural, and societal realms, where AI could be used as a tool of repression or a weapon of misinformation.
Scharre’s view of the U.S.-China competition is particularly compelling, given how he lays out the intricacies of each nation’s strategy. China’s advantage in data collection through its expansive surveillance apparatus and its streamlined ability to apply commercial tech to military use presents a daunting challenge for the U.S. Additionally, the interconnectedness of global AI ecosystems, where U.S. and Chinese firms collaborate and share talent, complicates efforts to decouple or protect intellectual property.
The book also prompts reflection on the ethical dimensions of AI weaponization. The idea that AI might be deployed in ways that exceed human control on the battlefield—the “battlefield singularity”—raises fundamental questions about how societies should manage the risks of such transformative technologies. It is concerning that, in a bid for dominance, countries might prioritize short-term gains over long-term safety and stability.
In conclusion, Four Battlegrounds offers a sobering analysis of the geopolitical competition for AI supremacy. It is a critical read for anyone interested in the future of warfare, global power dynamics, and the moral implications of AI-driven technologies. The book is not just about technology but also about the power it wields—and who will control it.
Conclusion
In Four Battlegrounds, Paul Scharre presents a compelling case for why technologically advanced nations will rule the world. AI is not just another technological innovation; it is a fundamental shift in the way nations will exert power, control economies, and conduct warfare in the 21st century.
Nations that lead in AI will hold the keys to military dominance, economic prosperity, and global influence. As the AI race heats up, it is clear that those who can harness the full potential of this technology will be the ones who shape the future of the world.
