September 1, 2025 | The National Interest
China Is Winning the AI Race With America’s Own Manhattan Project Lessons
China is applying the real lessons of the Manhattan Project to AI—talent and steady research funding—while America risks forgetting its own blueprint.
September 1, 2025 | The National Interest
China Is Winning the AI Race With America’s Own Manhattan Project Lessons
China is applying the real lessons of the Manhattan Project to AI—talent and steady research funding—while America risks forgetting its own blueprint.
Excerpt
As both China and the United States commemorate the eightieth anniversary of the close of the Second World War, the echoes of its end reverberate on both sides of the Pacific. While the United States was behind the Manhattan Project, it is China that is applying the lessons learned from building the bomb, using them in the race for ever-more advanced artificial intelligence (AI) systems that will revolutionize warfare.
Misreading the Manhattan Project
Applying the logic behind the Manhattan Project to the development of AI is appealing—a mad, government-sponsored dash towards unleashing a novel science will set the stage for the future of combat. The current administration is enamored of the analogy; Energy Secretary Chris Wright has drawn explicit parallels between the 1945 initiative and AI, while administration allies have called for a series of initiatives for AI based on the bomb’s construction.
But it’s a comparison based on a misunderstanding. The Manhattan Project was not the culmination of three years of work, but the result of decades of cultural development. It demonstrates the success of America’s long-term approach to science as an endless frontier that can only be nurtured by government spending in basic science and a culture of scientific openness shared among America’s closest allies—especially Britain in the case of the nuclear bomb. It is those tenets that offer a roadmap for pursuing powerful AI.
America’s Scientific Magnetism
In the 1930s to 1940s, this freedom to think and share ideas stood in marked contrast to growing fascism in Europe. While Germany was home to a disproportionate number of the greatest minds in physics at the beginning of the twentieth century—including Albert Einstein, Max Planck, and Werner Heisenberg—it was the United States that attracted the world’s brightest scientific talents away from the Nazi regime.
Jack Burnham is a research analyst in the China Program at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD). Follow Jack on X @JackBurnham802. Annie Fixler is the Director of FDD’s Center on Cyber and Technology Innovation and a Senior Fellow. Follow Annie on X @afixler.