Opinion

America is fighting yesterday’s AI war. Tomorrow’s war is on the way

China is treating the tech battle as a civilization-building project

By Lt. Col. Robert Maginnis, (ret.) Fox News

Published July 10, 2026 5:00am EDT

Facebook Twitter Threads Flipboard Comments Print Email Add Fox News on Google

close

Video

US must outcompete China's 'closed society' to win AI race, Rep Steil warns

Rep. Bryan Steil, R-Wis., discusses the AI race between the U.S. and China, emphasizing the need to maintain our innovation edge and protect infrastructure against Chinese intellectual property theft to ensure national security.

NEWYou can now listen to Fox News articles!

For more than two decades on the Army Staff, part of my job was recommending which nations received American weapons, training and doctrine, and which did not. The choice rarely came down to which weapon system performed best on a range. It came down to alliance.

A country that trained on American equipment, spoke our tactical language and built its systems around our supply chains stayed tied to Washington for a generation. One that turned to Moscow or Beijing drifted into someone else’s orbit.

That lesson has stayed with me. Great powers rarely prevail because they possess the single best weapon; they prevail because other nations choose to build their militaries, economies, and, ultimately, their futures around their systems. Washington risks forgetting that lesson in today’s race to build the world’s dominant computing platform.

ROBERT MAGINNIS: TRUMP’S ANKARA REMARKS REVEAL A GRAND STRATEGY HIDING IN PLAIN SIGHT

Not just a software race

While Washington argues over which chatbot drafts the sharper essay, Beijing is building something far more ambitious than a single flagship model. That distinction separates today’s technology race from tomorrow’s world order. Consider that China’s Huawei is preparing to double production of its Ascend processors in 2026, pushing toward 1.6 million chips, and Chinese developers at DeepSeek have already tuned their newest models to run specifically on that Huawei silicon.

SEN TODD YOUNG: THE HIDDEN DANGER CHINA’S SHIPS COULD BRING TO OUR SHORES

Wang Jianwei C, a professor at Peking University, tests an integrated photonic quantum........

© Fox News