“The Chinese wisely recognize that if a country standardizes on China’s AI platform, it likely will continue to rely on that platform in the future,” Smith said.

The US should move quickly to promote its AI technology as superior and more trustworthy, enlisting allies in the effort, he recommended.

For its part, Microsoft is on pace to invest about $80 billion this year to build out AI datacenters, train AI models and deploy cloud-based applications around the world, according to Smith.