This report examines nearly 350 artificial intelligence-related equipment contracts awarded by the People’s Liberation Army and state-owned defense enterprises in 2020 to assess how the Chinese military is adopting AI. The report identifies China’s key AI defense industry suppliers, highlights gaps in U.S. export control policies, and contextualizes the PLA’s AI investments within China’s broader strategy to compete militarily with the United States.

Created through a joint partnership between CSET and the AI Education Project, the AI Education Catalog aims to raise awareness of the AI-related programs available to students and educators, as well as to help inform AI education and workforce policy.

CSET submitted this comment to the Office of Science and Technology Policy and the National Science Foundation to support the work of the National Artificial Intelligence Research Resource (NAIRR) Task Force to develop an implementation roadmap that would provide AI researchers and students across scientific disciplines access to computational resources, high-quality data, educational tools, and user support.

Chinese and Russian government officials are keen to publicize their countries’ strategic partnership in emerging technologies, particularly artificial intelligence. This report evaluates the scope of cooperation between China and Russia as well as relative trends over time in two key metrics of AI development: research publications and investment. The findings expose gaps between aspirations and reality, bringing greater accuracy and nuance to current assessments of Sino-Russian tech cooperation.

Allies of the United States have begun to develop their own policy approaches to responsible military use of artificial intelligence. This issue brief looks at key allies with articulated, emerging, and nascent views on how to manage ethical risk in adopting military AI. The report compares their convergences and divergences, offering pathways for the United States, its allies, and multilateral institutions to develop common approaches to responsible AI implementation.

The Department of Defense can already begin applying its existing international science and technology agreements, global scientific networks, and role in multilateral institutions to stimulate digital defense cooperation. This issue brief frames this collection of options as a military AI cooperation toolbox, finding that the available tools offer valuable pathways to align policies, advance research, development, and testing, and to connect personnel–albeit in more structured ways in the Euro-Atlantic than in the Indo-Pacific.

Since 2011, China has dramatically grown its robotics sector as part of its mission to achieve technological leadership. The Chinese government has encouraged this growth through incentives and, in some cases, subsidies. Patents in robotics have surged, particularly at Chinese universities; by contrast, private companies comprise the bulk of robotics patent filers around the world. China has also seen a corresponding growth in robotics purchasing and active robotics stock. This data brief explores the trends in robotics patent families published from China as a measure of robotics advancement and finds that China is on track to emerge as a world leader in robotics.

AI technologies will likely alter great power competitions in foundational ways, changing both how nations create power and their motives for wielding it against one another. This paper is a first step toward thinking more expansively about AI & national power and seeking pragmatic insights for long-term U.S. competition with authoritarian governments.

China’s National Cybersecurity Center (NCC) resides on a 40 km2 plot in Wuhan. As one indication of its significance, the Chinese Communist Party’s highest-ranking members have an oversight committee for the facility. Over the next decade, the NCC will provide the talent, innovation, and indigenization of cyber capabilities that China’s Ministry of State Security, Ministry of Public Security, and People’s Liberation Army Strategic Support Force hacking teams lack. Though still under construction, the NCC’s first class of graduates will cross the stage in June 2022.

Using CSET’s new Map of Science to examine clusters of research publications, this data brief presents a comparative analysis of U.S. and Chinese research publication outputs. The authors find that global competition outcomes differ depending on the level of granularity when comparing research publication data. In a granular view of global scientific research, the United States and China together dominate almost two-thirds of the research publication output, with the rest of the world leading in more than one-third of publication output. In a general view of global scientific research, only China and the United States appear as leaders in research output.