The dominant narrative about the global AI race remains dangerously incomplete. In policy circles, think tanks, and boardrooms, the conversation is almost entirely fixated on which nation will reach artificial general intelligence (AGI) first, or who controls the largest models and the most compute. But this framing misses a fundamental reality.
The winner of the AI race will not be the country that merely invents the most powerful models—it will be the one that successfully integrates AI across society: in government, defense, industry, and everyday life. The decisive metric will be resilience—a nation’s ability to absorb the disruptive impacts of AI, adapt its institutions, and deploy AI systems with scale, trust, and strategic coherence.
China already understands this. The United States has yet to act like it does.
From Breakthrough to Battlefield
AI is no longer an emerging technology. It is a battlefield enabler, an economic engine, and a geopolitical accelerator. Beijing has made this clear with its doctrine of “civil-military fusion” and the sweeping integration of AI across surveillance, logistics, cyber operations, and state governance. The PRC is not only investing in foundational models; it is building the systems to diffuse those models into everyday statecraft and society.
The United States, by contrast, still treats AI as a tech sector phenomenon, siloed in elite labs and layered across venture-backed platforms. This risks forfeiting America’s first-mover advantage in AI capability to a slower, more fragmented pace of institutional adoption.
The real race is between two national models of AI diffusion—one state-directed, centrally orchestrated, and authoritarian; the other decentralized, innovation-driven, and democratic. And right now, only one of those models is demonstrating a coherent strategy for deploying AI at scale.
What Resilience Theory Tells Us About AI Strategy
Resilience theory, long applied in ecological and national security domains, offers a better framework for understanding the AI race. A resilient system is one that can absorb disruption without collapsing, adapt in real time, and evolve into a stronger version of itself.
The United States must build AI resilience not only in the digital infrastructure that powers its models, but in the institutions and communities that will live with AI’s impact. This means rethinking public policy, workforce systems, regulatory frameworks, and even the civic fabric that undergirds democratic trust.
As the implications of AI stretch across everything from labor markets to national defense, resilience becomes not just a societal strength—it becomes a competitive advantage.
This resilience must operate in two spheres:
- Governmental and Institutional: where AI systems are embedded into public infrastructure, decision-making, and defense strategy;
- Civic and Societal: where AI becomes part of everyday life, understood and utilized by individuals, small businesses, and civil society.
Only when both spheres are mobilized in concert will a nation be able to fully harness AI’s potential without succumbing to its destabilizing forces.
Strategic Diffusion: America’s Weak Link
While American firms lead the world in foundational AI research and investment, diffusion is where the U.S. currently lags. As of late 2024, 48% of state and local agencies reported using AI tools regularly, compared with 64% of federal agencies.
While adoption is progressing, large swaths of public institutions remain stuck in pilot phases or lack strategic coordination. AI literacy among the general public remains low, and outside of leading industries, many small businesses are unsure how to even begin implementing AI tools.
Meanwhile, China is embedding AI into education systems, port logistics, civil surveillance, and public health with top-down precision. Its model may be antithetical to liberal democracy—but it is operational.
To counter this, the U.S. must treat AI integration the same way it approached industrial mobilization in the mid-20th century: as a whole-of-society effort. This means:
- Deploying AI systems in public services that affect millions;
- Investing in AI fluency across sectors, not just among technologists;
- Coordinating local, state, and federal strategies to ensure adoption at every level; ? Building infrastructure for responsible AI governance, rooted in transparency and accountability.
This isn’t just about protecting democratic norms. It’s about survival in a geopolitical system where power will increasingly correlate to technological adaptability.
Democracy’s Advantage—If We Use It
There is reason for optimism. Democracies, by their nature, are pluralistic systems capable of bottom-up adaptation. If the U.S. can mobilize its local governments, educational systems, and innovation ecosystems, it can outcompete China not by mimicking centralization—but by activating its strengths: civic trust, entrepreneurial dynamism, and institutional diversity.
But this will require moving beyond AI as a private sector playground. We need structured pilots that show how AI can be safely and effectively deployed in public life. We need frameworks for communities to adapt to AI economically, socially, and politically. And we need a strategy for resilience, not just acceleration.
Most importantly, we need to stop waiting for integration to happen organically. It won’t.
Resilience as a Force Multiplier
Resilience theory tells us that it’s not enough to be fast or strong—what matters is the ability to bend without breaking.
For the United States, this means ensuring that AI enhances democratic institutions rather than undermining them, supports workers rather than replacing them wholesale, and secures our systems rather than making them more vulnerable to attack or manipulation.
Consider national defense. AI is already reshaping the nature of warfare, intelligence, and logistics. But without strategic integration—without resilient systems that can update policies, training, and operations in sync with the technology—military AI advantages will remain theoretical.
The same is true of economic competitiveness: if only elite firms know how to use AI, and the rest of the economy can’t keep up, America’s aggregate output and stability suffer.
Resilience is not just how we survive AI. It’s how we win with it.
The Stakes Are Civilizational
If we get this wrong, we risk ceding more than competitive edge—we risk ceding the norm-setting power that defines the next century. A world in which AI is integrated more thoroughly and effectively by authoritarian systems will not be a world that favors democratic values, open economies, or civil liberties.
We often talk about the AI race in technical terms. But it’s more than that. It is a civilizational contest—between governance models, between values, between ways of living.
The next great frontier of global order will be shaped not just by the models we build, but by how those models are lived with, by whom, and to what end.
This is why AI resilience matters. Not as a theory of system stability—but as a strategy for geopolitical survival.
Winning the AI race means being first in integration, not just invention. And that race is already underway.