Washington’s alliances are under immense strain. Many allies and partners are subject to increased threats from great-power adversaries, and they are coming to doubt whether they can rely on the United States. The response to these pressures is to rearm. Like the United States itself, U.S. partners across Asia, Europe, and elsewhere are building up their defense industrial and technological bases to improve their ability to project power, deter enemies, and prevail in a protracted conflict.

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A new front has opened in the U.S.-China competition in artificial intelligence: open-weight, local AI models. Until recently, the most capable AI models were too big and too costly to run anywhere but in giant data centers packed with expensive, specialized chips. But now these systems are rapidly migrating from the cloud to consumer hardware—including laptops and mobile devices—where they can answer questions, write code, and take actions on a user’s behalf without sending data to a remote server. Thanks to technological advances in both AI models and chips, the so-called open-weight AI models that increasingly underpin most local AI deployments are smarter and smaller than their predecessors and can be freely downloaded from the Internet, modified, and deployed without a centralized provider.

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In July, the Trump administration released an artificial intelligence action plan titled “Winning the AI Race,” which framed global competition over AI in stark terms: whichever country achieves dominance in the technology will reap overwhelming economic, military, and geopolitical advantages. As it did during the Cold War with the space race or the nuclear buildup, the U.S. government is now treating AI as a contest with a single finish line and a single victor.

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In recent years, the previous bipolar nuclear order led by the United States and Russia has given way to a more volatile tripolar one, as China has quantitatively and qualitatively built up its nuclear arsenal. At the same time, there have been significant breakthroughs in the field of artificial intelligence (AI) technologies, including for military applications. As a result of these two trends, understanding the AI-nuclear nexus in the context of U.S.-China-Russia geopolitical competition is increasingly urgent.

There are various military use cases for AI, including classification models, analytic and predictive models, generative AI, and autonomy. Given that variety, it is necessary to examine the AI-nuclear nexus across three broad categories: nuclear command, control, and communications; structural elements of the nuclear balance; and entanglement of AI-enabled conventional systems with nuclear risks. While each of these categories has the potential to generate risk, this report argues that the degree of risk posed by a particular case depends on three major factors: the role of humans, the degree to which AI systems become a single point of failure, and the AI offense-defense balance.

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Since the release of ChatGPT in November 2022, the breakneck pace of progress in artificial intelligence has made it nearly impossible for policymakers to keep up. But the AI revolution has only just begun. Today’s most powerful AI models, often referred to as “frontier AI,” can handle and generate images, audio, video, and computer code, in addition to natural language. Their remarkable performance has prompted ambitions among leading AI labs to achieve what is called “artificial general intelligence.” According to a growing number of experts, AGI systems equaling or surpassing humans across a wide range of cognitive tasks—the equivalent of millions of brilliant minds working tirelessly at the top of their fields at machine speed—may soon be capable of unlocking scientific discoveries, enhancing economic productivity, and tackling tough national security challenges. With advances once in the realm of science fiction now in the realm of possibility, the United States has no time to spare in crafting a coherent and truly global strategy.

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Discussions in Washington about artificial intelligence increasingly turn to how the United States can win the AI race with China. One of President Donald Trump’s first acts on returning to office was to sign an executive order declaring the need to “sustain and enhance America’s global AI dominance.” At the Paris AI Action Summit in February, Vice President JD Vance emphasized the administration’s commitment to ensuring that “American AI technology continues to be the gold standard worldwide.” And in May, David Sacks, Trump’s AI and crypto czar, cited the need “to win the AI race” to justify exporting advanced AI chips to the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia.

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In September 2022, National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan identified quantum technologies as one of three — biotech, clean energy (including batteries), and next-generation computing (including quantum and semiconductors)—that are critical to the economic and national security of the United States.1 By allowing for new methods of computation, sensing, and communications, quantum technologies have the potential to revolutionize not only commercial industries, such as financial services, chemical engineering, and energy (among others), but also national security capabilities, such as code breaking and remote sensing.