US-China Locked in ‘Unwinnable’ War on AI, NYU’s Marcus Says

The US-China artificial intelligence race will end in a tie rather than a decisive victory for either side, New York University professor Gary Marcus said.

He likened the competition to Coke and Pepsi, where both soda makers each retain their market share without driving the other out of business. US AI models are generally better, he said, though the ones from China are cheaper.

“The tragedy of our error is that these two countries are putting in so much effort to try to win what I think is an unwinnable war,” he said in a Bloomberg TV interview with Yvonne Man at the Bloomberg New Economy Forum in New Delhi. “And so they’re pushing things into being a zero-sum game.”

He reiterated his earlier warnings about the risk of AI, citing the security failures that followed, saying his prediction of AI coding agents becoming “a security nightmare” had proven correct.

On regulation, Marcus called for external reviews ahead of new models, similar to those conducted by the US Food and Drug Administration, where independent assessors examine whether a model’s benefits outweigh its risks before release, he said.

He also called for more cooperation between the US and China, rather than banning AI models from another country.

“The rules around safety should be universal, and I really think that US and China should make a deal around that,” he said, where they could be in communication about incidents and errors. “Going it alone here is not a great idea.”

This story was produced with the assistance of Bloomberg Automation.