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."XI PREPARES CHINA ‘FOR BATTLE’ AS EXPERT WARNS OF GRAVE DANGER FACING US AHEAD OF DC SUMMITChinese President Xi Jinping, left, shakes hands with U.S.President Donald Trump at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing, Thursday, May 14, 2026.
(Kenny Holston/Pool Photo via AP)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, ...