When Google’s AlphaGo defeated the Chinese grandmaster at a game of Go in 2017, China was confronted with its own “Sputnik moment”: a prompt to up its game on the development of artifical intelligence (AI). Sure enough, Beijing is pursuing launch a national-level AI innovation agenda for “civil-military fusion”. It’s part of China’s ambitious quest to become a “science and technology superpower” – but also a new front in an increasingly worrisome arms race.