Abstract

Artificial intelligence (AI) is no longer on the fringe of a more commercial and technical environment but on the frontline of a strategic sphere where power, security, and leadership between nations are now being negotiated. It is argued in this paper that how AI can transform world power relations in the context of the US-China rivalry is critically analysed as the current discourse on an unavoidable AI arms race is analytically veneer and politically misguided. The paper approaches AI as a politically constituted resource and embedded within infrastructures (in particular semiconductors), data regimes and dual-use military-civil innovation systems, each of which creates new chokepoints, dependencies and leverage. The analysis combines neorealism, techno-nationalism, and international leadership theory so as to demonstrate that AI both amplifies the security dilemma (by imposing opacities, speed, and dual-use ambiguity) and limits institutional cooperation by transforming interdependence into vulnerability. It also shows that the competition of AI is not a competition of technological primacy, but it is also a rivalry of forms of governance and normative authority, as the US market-led innovation and rights-based discourse clash with a China-driven state-directed approach and sovereignty-first vision. This is not a coherent hegemonic order but an atomised government space in which middle powers increasingly find themselves in dilemmas as they selectively make rules, and compete in standards and export measures. This paper comes to the conclusion that technological determinism is not the most significant aspect of modern AI geopolitics, but a lack of leadership: as strategies outpace the creation of credible, representative, and stabilising forms of governance, this exacerbates instability, fuels the creation of blocs and cements technological inequality.