Tom Emmer says Trump is'fixing' inflation from Biden's'broken economy' U.S. AI technology race is new'cold war' between US and China that could have devastating consequences: report

Just don't expect to fly any of these Cold War relics. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. Over a dozen vintage planes are currently scattered across an aircraft boneyard in northern Wyoming. If you can travel about 85 miles east of Yellowstone National Park to Big Horn County, relics such as a Lockheed P-2 Neptune could be yours for as low as $25--just don't expect to fly away in any of your new purchases. But they're county assets, and the county is selling them," Big Horn County Airport manager Paul Thur told Wyoming's earlier this month.

No, it was not a "Sputnik moment". The launch last month of DeepSeek R1, the Chinese generative AI or chatbot, created mayhem in the tech world, with stocks plummeting and much chatter about the US losing its supremacy in AI technology. Yet, for all the disruption, the Sputnik analogy reveals less about DeepSeek than about American neuroses. The original Sputnik moment came on 4 October 1957 when the Soviet Union shocked the world by launching Sputnik 1, the first time humanity had sent a satellite into orbit. It was, to anachronistically borrow a phrase from a later and even more momentous landmark, "one giant leap for mankind", in Neil Armstrong's historic words as he took a "small step" on to the surface of the moon.

An illustration of a large envelope fills the screen--I've received a new e-mail, my first in weeks. I click on the middle of the envelope and a note opens in size thirty-six font. It's a top-secret assignment for me, a renegade ex-C.I.A. agent who can kick higher than anyone else in the agency. "Looks like this old dog is heading back to the pound," I growl, and close the e-mail by turning off my entire computer. I pull up a digitized photo on the screen.

It's September 2023, and markets have become battlefields, as economics and geopolitics become ever more closely intertwined. Many think that we are returning to the Cold War, but we're not. Back then, the military had the materiel and commanded the view of war. Whether the U.S. fulfills its national security ambitions doesn't just depend on its armed forces, but its relationship with firms. The recent revelation that Elon Musk used his control of the Starlink satellite system to unilaterally decide the limits on a Ukrainian offensive is just one example of how business can, quite literally, call the shots.

The United States is no stranger to technological arms races, having spent much of the Cold War in a two-pronged one-upmanship effort against the Soviet Union to build bigger rockets and land those on the moon. Its rivalry now is with China, and the latest battleground is artificial intelligence. China has long sought to dominate the AI landscape, laying out a plan to become a "global leader" in the sector by 2030 and pledging billions of state dollars for research and development. U.S. breakthroughs have been more organic, illustrated most recently by the rapid global uptake of chatbots made by American companies, such as Google, Microsoft, and OpenAI, with Chinese counterparts largely playing catch-up. One fundamental distinction is the private sector's role at the forefront of developing new AI capabilities: There were no private-built rockets in the 1960s.

Grand historical inflection points rarely take the form of long bureaucratic documents, but sometimes they do. On October 7th the Department of Commerce issued its revised policy on AI and semiconductor technology exports to China. The 139 pages of new export control regulations placed a de facto ban on exports to China of the advanced computer chips that power AI algorithms. Since more than 95% of such chips used in China are designed by U.S. semiconductor companies and therefore subject to U.S. export controls, loss of access to U.S. chips puts China's entire future as an AI superpower in jeopardy. AI was the top technology priority listed in the Chinese government's five-year economic plan for 2021-2026, so this action makes clear that the U.S. intends to block China from achieving its top technological goal. Ten days after the new policy came out, Secretary of State Antony Blinken gave a major speech in which he said, "We are at an inflection point.

Vivek Wadhwa and Mauritz Kop recently penned an op-ed urging governments around the world to get ahead of the threat posed by the emerging technology known as quantum computing. They even went so far as to title their article "Why Quantum Computing is Even More Dangerous Than Artificial Intelligence." Up front: This one gets a very respectful hard-disagree from me. While I do believe that quantum computing does pose an existential threat to humanity, my reasons differ wildly from those proposed by Wadhwa and Kop. Wadhwa and Kop open their article with a description of AI's failures, potential misuse, and how the media's narrative has exacerbated the danger of AI before it settles on a powerful lead: The world's failure to rein in the demon of AI--or rather, the crude technologies masquerading as such--should serve to be a profound warning.

Fox News contributor tells Laura Ingraham that Vladimir Putin is sitting back laughing at the Biden administration. As Russia enters week three of a full-scale invasion of Ukraine, many are already calling this the Second Cold War. Others are saying the first never ended. But what we are seeing today is entirely different: a new war for a new era, and one that is unlikely to end anytime soon. Much like we never imagined hijackers flying planes into buildings in New York, or that the Taliban could seize Kabul in a week, most people never imagined that a major world power would embark on the largest invasion since World War II to take over a sovereign nation just because its autocratic leader felt like it.

This story is adapted from Spies, Lies, and Algorithms: The History and Future of American Intelligence, by Amy B. Zegart. We've seen technological advances before. But never have we seen the convergence of so many new technologies changing so much so fast. This moment is challenging American intelligence agencies in three profound ways. If you buy something using links in our stories, we may earn a commission.