Recent developments in artificial intelligence (AI) suggest that this emerging technology will have a deterministic and potentially transformative influence on military power, strategic competition, and world politics more broadly. After the initial surge of widespread speculation in the literature related to AI this article provides some much-needed specificity to the debate. It argues that left unchecked the uncertainties and vulnerabilities created by the rapid proliferation and diffusion of AI could become a significant potential source of instability and great power strategic rivalry. The article identifies several AI-related innovations and technological developments that will likely have substantial consequences for military applications from a tactical battlefield perspective to the strategic level.

Will the use of artificial intelligence (AI) in strategic decision-making be stabilizing or destabilizing? What are the risks and trade-offs of pre-delegating military force (or automating escalation) to machines? How might non-nuclear (and non-state actors) state leverage AI to put pressure on nuclear states? This article analyzes the impact of strategic stability of the use of AI in the strategic decision-making process, in particular, the risks and trade-offs of pre-delegating military force (or automating escalation) to machines. It argues that AI-enabled decision support tools by substituting the role of human critical thinking, empathy, creativity, and intuition in the strategic decisionmaking process will be fundamentally destabilizing. In particular, if defense planners come to view AI's 'support' function as a panacea for the cognitive fallibilities and human analysis and decision-making. The article also considers the nefarious use of AI-enhanced fake news, deepfakes, bots, and other forms of social media by non-state actors and state proxy actors, which might cause states to exaggerate a threat from ambiguous or manipulated information, increasing instability.

This article uses the international relations (IR) 'polarity' concept as a lens to view the shifting great power dynamics in artificial intelligence (AI) and related enabling technologies. The article describes how and why great power competition is mounting in within several interrelated dual-use technological fields; why these innovations are considered by Washington to be strategically vital, and how (and to what end) the United States is responding to the perceived challenge posed by China to its technological hegemony. The following questions addressed in this paper fill a gap in the existing literature: Will the increasingly competitive U.S.-China relationship dominate world politics creating a new bipolar world order, as opposed to a multipolar one? Why does the U.S. view China's progress in dual-use AI as a threat to its first-mover advantage? How might the U.S. respond to this perceived threat?