Harnessed Lightning: How the Chinese Military us Adopting Artificial Intelligence by Ryan Fedasiuk, Jennifer Melot, and Ben Murphy, this CSET report analyzes 343 AI-related equipment contracts, selected from a broader set of procurement records published by PLA units and state-owned defense enterprises in 2020. This is one of the most detailed assessments of how the Chinese military is applying AI in practice. There’s so much to digest here, including examples of Chinese suppliers that “make a business out of sourcing foreign data or components and reselling them to sanctioned Chinese defense companies or PLA units.” One funny detail in the appendices: The authors also used an AI research assistant to check their manual coding of the 343 contracts into seven different application categories. On the first run through, this AI research assistant disagreed with the authors’ initial coding half of the time. Still, speaks to the extent to which the report tried to double-check results.