The Pentagon’s first chief software officer has said China is heading for global dominance because of its advances in artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning, and cyber capabilities, and that Washington has already lost the AI flight to Beijing.
Nicolas Chaillan told the Financial Times in an interview published on Sunday that he resigned in protest at the slow pace of technological transformation in the US military and because he could not stand to watch China surpass the United States.
Chaillan, who spent three years on a Pentagon-wide effort to boost cyber security, told the British newspaper that the United States has failed to respond to what he called Chinese cyber and other threats.
“We have no competing fighting chance against China in 15 to 20 years. Right now, it’s already a done deal; it is already over in my opinion,” he said, adding there was “good reason to be angry”.
The 37-year-old said argued artificial intelligence, machine learning, and cyber capabilities were far more critical to the future of the US than hardware such as big-budget fifth-generation fighter jets such as the F-35.
“Whether it takes a war or not is kind of anecdotal,” he said.
The expert claimed that China was set to dominate the future of the world, and would control everything from media narratives to geopolitics.
He pointed out that US cyber defenses in some government departments were at “kindergarten level”.
A US national security commission warned earlier this year that China could overtake the US as the world’s AI superpower within the next decade, according to the Financial Times.
The rivalry between the US and China has intensified in recent years, with Beijing’s growing international clout and rapid economic progress emerging as a viable counter-weight to the US.
The United States has accused the Chinese government of widespread destabilizing activities in cyberspace, including through a massive breach of Microsoft email systems used by many of the world’s big companies.
Microsoft had previously claimed that hackers linked to the Chinese Ministry of State Security had infiltrated the software company’s email systems in March. But the statement from the White House marked the first time that the US formally accused China of paying hackers to carry out ransomware attacks to extort companies for millions of dollars.
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However, according to a Chinese political analyst and researcher, the United States is a cybersecurity threat to China the same way Washington currently considers Beijing as its No.1 cybersecurity threat.
Yilun Zhang, who is a Research Associate and Administrative Officer at the Institute for China-America Studies,
The United States is the “empire of hacking and theft of secrets,” and the “biggest threat to global cybersecurity,” said Senior Colonel Wu Qian, spokesman of the Chinese Ministry of National Defense.
Wu said the US has conducted mass-scale cyber espionage, surveillance, and attacks on foreign governments, companies, and individuals for years, calling on the international community to push back against the US cyberbullying and to urge it to explain its spying operations.
