China and the US are engaged in a “new cold war” over technology and Beijing is narrowing the gap, the Munich Security Conference has heard.
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Participants said Washington was likely to try to maintain its edge by increasing investment in military technology and tightening export controls on advanced chips.
“We’re not competing for competing’s sake. It is more accurately a new cold war,” former Republican congressman Mike Gallagher, now head of defence at Palantir Technologies, told a panel discussion on Friday.
“It is global and the stakes are existential, in which at least one side is trying to destroy the free world. And if we don’t understand it as such, I fear we will never muster the sense of urgency that is necessary to not only win that cold war, but prevent it from becoming hot.”
He said afterwards that there was still “a window of opportunity right now with the new administration to make game-changing investments in key technologies and leverage AI at scale” for the US military.
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“Technologically, I think we [the US] still have a lead, but it is a narrow lead,” he added.