Booz Allen's Chief Warns U.S. of a 'Close Race' With China on AI

The chief executive officer of government contractor Booz Allen Hamilton Inc. warned that the U.S. has only a small advantage over China in the rising field of artificial intelligence and is at risk of falling behind without a "national strategy." "It's not the 50-year edge that we have in building aircraft carriers," Horacio Rozanski said Thursday in a meeting with Bloomberg editors and reporters in Washington. Chinese President Xi Jinping has made a 10-fold increase in AI output a national priority as the world's second-largest economy seeks to dominate the industry by 2030. The U.S. has little formal AI strategy at the federal level, although resources and government projects have accelerated in the last year or so, Rozanski said. "The investments are being driven at this point by the strategies of the different parts of the government, as opposed to collective strategy," he said.