US Sees India as Key AI Partner Amid Growing China Challenge

During a Senate hearing on Tuesday (December 2), witnesses stressed that the coming year will require deeper coordination among democratic partners — including India — to shape global AI standards, safeguard chip supply chains, and counter Beijing's ambitions.

The Senate Foreign Relations Subcommittee on East Asia, the Pacific, and International Cybersecurity Policy convened the session to assess geopolitical risks emerging from China's AI acceleration. While much of the discussion focused on export controls and military implications, India surfaced early as a pivotal country in the emerging governance architecture.

A direct India link was drawn by Tarun Chhabra, a former White House national security official now at Anthropic, who argued that building trusted AI frameworks will require close coordination with like-minded democracies.

He said, "The closest thing we have right now is the AI summits that are happening," and added, "There's one coming up in India, and that's an opportunity for us to build the kind of trusted AI framework that I mentioned earlier."

India is scheduled to host a major AI summit in February 2026.

Chhabra said leadership in AI will profoundly shape economic prosperity and national security and described the next two to three years as a "critical window" for both frontier AI development and global AI diffusion.

Warning that China cannot produce competitive AI chips unless the US squanders its advantage, he urged stricter controls to prevent "CCP-controlled companies" from filling their data centres with American hardware.

Senators Pete Ricketts and Chris Coons framed the AI race in terms that resonate strongly with India's own strategic calculus. Ricketts said the challenge resembles "sputnik" and the Cold War–era space race, declaring that the US now faces "a similar contest, this time with Communist China and even higher stakes."

He said Artificial intelligence will revolutionise daily life, and its military uses will shape the global balance of power. “Beijing is racing to fuse civilian AI with its military to seize the next revolution in military affairs. However, unlike the moon landing, the finish line in the AI race is far less clear,” he said.

Coons echoed that American and allied leadership in AI is essential to ensure that global adoption rests on "our chips, our cloud infrastructure and our models." He emphasised that China has "poured money into research, development, deployment" and highlighted Beijing's stated goal "to be the world's leading AI power by 2030." He said maintaining AI primacy must be "a central national imperative," linking it directly to the broader geostrategic landscape.

Experts warned that China's military integration of AI is advancing quickly. Chris Miller of AEI said both Russia and Ukraine already rely on AI to "sift through intelligence data and identify what signal is and what is noise," and argued that the same technologies are rapidly becoming essential to defence planning.

He said US leadership in computing power remains profound. Still, the country must maintain an edge in "electrical power," "computing power," and "brain power" — the three ingredients he described as essential for sustained AI dominance.

Gregory Allen of CSIS said AI is following a trajectory similar to the early years of computing, becoming a foundational technology across military, intelligence and economic sectors. He warned that "the idea that the United States can lose its advantage in AI and maintain its advantage in military power is simply nonsensical." He praised US chip export controls as the most consequential action taken in recent years, arguing that without them "the largest data centres today would already be in China."

Allen also opposed allowing Chinese companies remote access to US cloud computing, saying such access would help them "build their own platforms" before "they will drop American companies."

James Mulvenon, a leading Chinese military expert, warned that the PLA is integrating large language models "at every level of its system," building an AI-driven decision architecture it views as "superior to human cognition."

He said Beijing is confident it can obtain Western chips through "smuggling and a planetary scale level of technology espionage."

All four witnesses rejected any proposal to export NVIDIA's advanced H-200 or Blackwell chips to China. Allen said Blackwells "do what Chinese chips can't" and warned that selling them would give Beijing "a bridge to the future" it is currently unable to build.

For India, the hearing highlighted emerging opportunities — and obligations — to shape global AI rules and secure access to trusted semiconductor ecosystems. India's expanding partnership with the United States on critical and emerging technologies aligns with Washington's push for a "democratic tech stack" to counter China's AI diffusion.

The upcoming AI summit in India, cited by Chhabra, underscores New Delhi's growing role in the governance of advanced technologies at a moment when standards, safety protocols and supply-chain security are being rewritten.

India, which faces persistent Chinese military pressure along the border and increasing PLA deployment of AI-enabled surveillance and unmanned systems, has a direct stake in the outcomes of US-China technology competition.

Both countries are deepening cooperation across semiconductors, cloud infrastructure, cybersecurity, and dual-use AI applications — a trajectory likely to accelerate as Washington moves to formalise new AI controls and India expands its own semiconductor and digital-governance footprint.

- IANS