Beyond killer robots: China's real AI threat to America is already here, experts warn

While Americans brace for a futuristic AI war of killer robots and bioweapons, experts warn ahead of President Xi Jinping's U.S. visit this week that Beijing is already actively undermining America's global supremacy through AI without ever firing a shot.

Experts who spoke with Fox News Digital outlined a stealthy, three-part playbook, which includes extracting the logic of American models, undercutting U.S. developers with free open-source software, and ultimately weaponizing those systems for things like cognitive warfare. They laid out how China bypasses billions of dollars in U.S. research through labs that interrogate cutting-edge American AI and copy its capabilities, while simultaneously flooding the global market with free alternatives.

"I think a ‘race’ is the wrong metaphor for this," Leah Siskind, an AI research fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, told Fox News Digital. "I think it's kind of like a multi-front war. And in some places, we're winning and some places we're losing."

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While top American tech firms have poured billions into building ultra-expensive, proprietary systems, China has focused heavily on distributing free, open-source models across the globe. Siskind warned that because American tech is costly and the U.S. sector has largely neglected open-source investment, many Fortune 500 companies are making the financial choice to run their operations on Chinese models—unwittingly opening the door to potential CCP censorship, hidden backdoors and, ultimately, global dominance.

"How can you compete with something that's free when American tech is very, very expensive?" Siskind said. "How can we ensure that a Chinese open-source model would be truly clean, that it'd be truly free of CCP censorship? We can't be—we just wouldn't know. And that's by design. We wouldn't know what sort of trick backdoors might be implanted and how that could rear its head later on."

Meanwhile, China expert Gordon Chang warned that Beijing is intentionally using these free models to repeat an economic tactic it previously deployed to corner a different industry.

"This is a tactic that China used with solar panels," Chang told Fox News Digital. "Beijing sees that one day it will drive out the American models on cost and availability, and they will then dominate global AI."

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But to flood the market with free software, Beijing first needs the underlying technology—and a way to bypass America's massive lead in computing power.

Chang noted that the U.S. possesses a commanding lead in physical infrastructure, boasting over 5,400 data centers compared to China's roughly 450, along with far superior microchips. To work around the staggering hardware and energy costs required to train artificial intelligence from scratch, Siskind warned that Chinese labs are closing the gap through a process known as "knowledge distillation"—a method where a smaller model essentially interrogates a larger, smarter American model to copy its logic.

"They are able to leapfrog the process by kind of stealing this information," Siskind said, pointing to the Chinese model DeepSeek as a prime example. "This is how they were able to release models like DeepSeek in 2025, which was seismic news because they were able to show that they were really competing with cutting-edge American models and had invested a fraction of the resources."

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The threat is not theoretical. Just last week, the Department of Homeland Security issued a joint cybersecurity advisory warning that Chinese companies are conducting "industrial-scale knowledge distillation campaigns" to extract proprietary capabilities from U.S. frontier models.

Beyond economic undercutting and software theft, the experts also warned Beijing is simultaneously deploying artificial intelligence into physical supply chains and public influence campaigns.

Rather than sci-fi "killer robots," Siskind emphasized that China's immediate physical priority is "embodied AI"—embedding artificial intelligence into real-world infrastructure like factory automation, commercial drones, and autonomous supply chains. Meanwhile, Chang warned that AI-enhanced propaganda poses a direct threat to American decision-making and democratic sovereignty.

"They're very good at cognitive warfare, and they can enhance their capabilities with artificial intelligence," Chang said. "We do not want our elections determined in China. We do not want our critical national security decisions being made in Beijing. And that's not impossible."

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As President Xi Jinping arrives in the U.S. this week, the experts who spoke to Fox News Digital said the White House must treat these non-cinematic threats with the same urgency as traditional military posturing.

To protect America's remaining edge, Siskind said Washington must tighten chip export loopholes, blacklist foreign labs engaging in deceptive distillation, and incentivize U.S. open-source development—emphasizing that "it is very important that the most advanced systems are developed under democracy and represent democratic values, as opposed to authoritarian values."

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For Chang, the stakes of that technological defense extend far beyond standard economic competition.

"Xi Jinping throughout this century has been pushing the Chinese imperial-era notion of Tianxia, or 'all under heaven'—that China's rulers have a right to rule the world," Chang warned. "That sounds ludicrous to us, but a Chinese regime powered by AI might actually be able to accomplish that. We certainly do not want our decisions being made in the Chinese capital."

Addressing the United Nations General Assembly on Tuesday, President Donald Trump reiterated Washington's goal of outpacing China, declaring that U.S. government documents will now refer to AI as "superintelligence."

"The United States totally rejects any attempt to construct a globalist scheme to control the artificial intelligence being spoken of," Trump told world leaders. "Whoever wins superintelligence wins. And we're leading now over China by a lot and everyone else. And we're going to keep it that way."