Former Pentagon Chief's Startling Revelations On US AI Tech Versus China: FT

The Pentagon's first chief software officer resigned in protest of the U.S. military's lagging technological transformation behind China, Financial Times reports.

Chaillan alleged that the U.S. repeatedly put military officials in charge of cyber initiatives for which they lacked experience, decrying Pentagon "laggards" and absence of funding.

Recently the Congress warned that China could surpass the U.S. as the A.I. superpower within the next decade. The U.S.'s failure to respond to Chinese cyber and other threats was allegedly compromising the safety of Nicolas Chaillan's children, as per the former U.S. Air Force chief.

"We have no competing fighting chance against China in 15 to 20 years," Chaillan said, comparing as cyber defenses in some U.S. government departments were at "kindergarten level." After three years of a Pentagon-wide effort to boost cyber security, Chaillan said Beijing is heading for global dominance because of its advances in artificial intelligence, machine learning, and cyber capabilities. 

He argued that these emerging technologies were far more critical to America's future than the big-budget fifth-generation fighter jets like the F-35. Chaillan blamed Alphabet Inc GOOG GOOGL Google's objection to work with the U.S. defense department on A.I. and extensive debates over A.I. ethics. Contrastingly, the Chinese companies were obliged to work with Beijing and make "massive investments" into A.I. without ethics. 

Chaillan plans to testify to Congress about the Chinese cyber threat to U.S. supremacy. Robert Spalding, a retired Air Force brigadier general who served as defense attaché in Beijing, endorsed Chaillan.