“Reflections on Warfare Brought by AGI” (AGI带来的战争思考) Source: PLA Daily (解放军报) Date: January 21, 2025 Authors: Rong Ming (荣明), Hu Xiaofeng (胡晓峰)
Introduction
Please feel free to skip to the translation, about halfway down, though I would recommend reading the sections “On the source” and "On the Authors" just above it too.
In November 2024, the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission recommended that “Congress establish and fund a Manhattan Project-like program dedicated to racing to and acquiring an Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) capability.” The United States increasingly treats advanced AI as a strategic imperative, and China is frequently invoked as a reason to race. The broader framing of AI competition as a race between great powers reflects an assumption that China is a peer competitor in pursuing AGI.
But is China pursuing AGI? The prevailing expert view says no. China's August 2025 AI+ Action Plan reads as diffusion-first industrial policy, with adoption targets of 70 percent by 2027 and 90 percent by 2030, not frontier ambitions. In a June 2025 paper, "The Most Dangerous Fiction: The Rhetoric and Reality of the AI Race," Cambridge researcher Seán Ó hÉigeartaigh argued that there was little evidence of a top-down Chinese AGI effort, and that the narrative served Western corporate interests. He also noted the translation ambiguity of 通用人工智能, which can mean either "artificial general intelligence" or "general-purpose AI." But Ó hÉigeartaigh acknowledged a significant limitation to his analysis, namely that he had no visibility into China's defense sector. RAND researcher Kyle Chan reached similar conclusions in a February 2026 analysis, "Does China Care About AGI?", reinforcing that Chinese policy documents rarely referenced AGI and noting that President Xi's April 2025 Politburo study session did not mention the term.
The most prominent challenge to this consensus gets the correction wrong. In October 2025, researcher Matthew Johnson at Jamestown argued that AGI has "quietly become central" to Beijing's strategy. But this analysis rested heavily on references to 通用人工智能 in policy documents without adequately grappling with the translation ambiguity. Much of the evidence Johnson cited was more consistent with the general-purpose AI reading than the AGI reading.
The picture from Western analysis, then, is that the Chinese government does not prioritize AGI as a strategic objective. Yet the country's private sector complicates this narrative. As Kyle Chan has documented, DeepSeek's founder Liang Wenfeng has stated "Our destination is AGI," and Zhipu's CEO Zhang Peng has said the company was founded to "explore what AGI ultimately is." These ambitions run up against compute realities. At the AGI-Next Summit at Tsinghua University in January 2026, Alibaba's Qwen team lead Lin Junyang acknowledged that US labs operate with one to two orders of magnitude more compute than their Chinese counterparts, a gap corroborated by Epoch AI's tracking of global AI supercomputer capacity. China's AI labs want some notion of AGI but realize they are severely resource constrained.
Correctly gauging China's AGI ambitions and the government's situational awareness has concrete policy consequences. If the US overestimates them, it risks unnecessary escalation. If it underestimates China's strategic awareness, it risks being caught off guard. For instance, how we characterize China's AI ambitions shapes whether compute governance is treated as a serious national security tool or dismissed as trade protectionism.
One underexploited source for this question is China's military discourse. Last year, in January 2025, PLA Dailypublished "Reflections on Warfare Brought by AGI" (AGI带来的战争思考), a full-page article by Rong Ming and Hu Xiaofeng that engages precisely these questions. The article was briefly noted in the Center for China Analysis's PLA Watch newsletter in March 2025. It has not otherwise received sustained analysis or translation in Western policy outlets. A partial translation appeared on the specialist blog Red Dragon 1949 in January 2026, a full year after publication, containing errors.
I have been sitting on this for a while, hoping to place it in the context of a larger project on Chinese thinking on AGI. That project is taking longer than expected. In the meantime, this piece has been gathering dust, and I think it is better in the community than in my notes. I am publishing a translation here, produced with AI assistance and edited for faithfulness and footnoted by me.
On the source
PLA Daily (解放军报) is the official newspaper of the Chinese People's Liberation Army, founded in 1956. Its readership is primarily active-duty PLA and People's Armed Police personnel, though it has been publicly distributed since 1987. Its contents are editorially reviewed for alignment with military and party positions.
“Reflections on Warfare Brought by AGI” appeared on page 7 of the January 21, 2025 issue, in the Military Forum (军事论坛) section, beneath the standing banner "Study Military Affairs, Study War, Study Fighting" (研究军事、研究战争、研究打仗), a Xi Jinping directive that PLA Daily displays prominently. It is part of the "Perspectives on Intelligentized Warfare" (智能化战争面面观) column, which had run for over 70 installments by April 2023. ("Intelligentized warfare" is a translation of a Chinese term of art; "intelligentized" is awkward in English but is the standard rendering in Western scholarship on PLA doctrine.)
The article is online at 81.cn (81 refers to August 1st, the PLA's founding date and the basis of Army Day), and mirrored at Xinhua, Sina Military, and Guangming Daily. A PDF of the complete issue was previously available (I had last visited in March, I believe) at https://rmt-static-publish.81.cn/file/20250121/1d8217bd734a96b191cf7d33a81fe782.pdf but that link is now dead.
On the authors
Rong Ming and Hu Xiaofeng are both affiliated with the College of Joint Operations at China's National Defense University, the PLA's highest military academic institution, directly under the Central Military Commission (CMC) and responsible for training the military's most senior commanders.
Hu Xiaofeng is a figure worth understanding. He is a professor and senior engineer who held the rank of Major General, and the chief designer of the PLA's first large-scale computer wargaming system. He has published more than ten monographs and received multiple National Science and Technology Progress Awards. Xi Jinping, as CMC Chairman, personally signed the order awarding him a military merit citation. His audio course on the science of war had accumulated over 33 million plays on the PLA's professional education platform as of 2020. When Hu Xiaofeng writes about AGI in PLA Daily, it is not futurism.
Translation
Reflections on Warfare Brought by AGI(AGI带来的战争思考)
Rong Ming, Hu Xiaofeng
Editor's Note
Science and technology and warfare are always intertwined. While technological innovation continuously changes the face of war, it has not changed war's violent nature or its coercive purpose. In recent years, as artificial intelligence (AI) technology has developed and been applied rapidly, debate about its impact on warfare has never stopped. Compared to AI, artificial general intelligence (AGI)[1] represents a higher level of intelligence and is considered a form of intelligence on par with that of humans. How will the emergence of AGI affect warfare? Will it change war's violent and coercive character? This article explores these questions together with the reader.
Many believe that, although large models and generative AI demonstrate powerful military potential that prefigures future AGI, they are ultimately only enabling technologies. They can only optimize and enhance existing weapons and equipment, making them smarter and improving operational efficiency, but cannot bring about a true military revolution. This is somewhat like cyberwarfare capabilities,[3] which when they first appeared were placed in high hopes by many countries, but which now seem, in retrospect, to have been genuinely somewhat exaggerated.
AGI's disruptive nature is entirely different. It brings enormous changes to the battlefield with reaction speeds and breadth of knowledge far exceeding human capability. More importantly, it produces enormous disruptive results by accelerating scientific and technological progress. On future battlefields, autonomous weapons will be endowed with advanced intelligence by AGI, their performance universally enhanced, and by virtue of their speed and swarm advantages, become strong in offense and difficult to defend against[4]. At that point, the high-intelligence autonomous weapons that some scientists once predicted will become reality, with AGI playing a key role. Current military applications of AI include autonomous weapons, intelligence analysis, intelligent decision-making, intelligent training, and intelligent logistics support, and these applications are difficult to summarize simply as mere "enabling."[5] Moreover, AGI develops rapidly with short iteration cycles and is in a state of continuous evolution. In future operations, AGI must be treated as a priority, with particular attention to the changes it may bring.
Will AGI make war disappear?
The historian Geoffrey Blainey[6] argued that wars always occur because of mistaken assessments of each side's strength or will. With AGI's application in military affairs, miscalculation will become less frequent. Some scholars therefore speculate that war will decrease or disappear as a result. In practice, AGI can indeed reduce a great deal of miscalculation, but even so it cannot eliminate all uncertainty, since uncertainty is one of war's defining characteristics. Moreover, not all wars arise from miscalculation, and AGI's inherent unpredictability and opacity, combined with humanity's lack of practical experience in using AGI, will introduce new uncertainties, plunging people into an ever thicker "artificial intelligence fog."[7]
AGI algorithms also present a problem for rationality.[8] Some scholars argue that AGI’s capability to mine[9] critical intelligence and generate precise predictions has a dual effect. At a practical operational level, AGI does make fewer mistakes than humans and can improve intelligence accuracy, helping to reduce miscalculation; but it may also make humans blindly overconfident, inciting them to take desperate gambles.[10] The offensive advantage brought by AGI means the optimal defensive strategy becomes striking first, breaking the balance between offense and defense, triggering new security dilemmas, and actually increasing the risk of war.
AGI is highly general-purpose and easily integrated with weapons systems. Unlike nuclear, biological, and chemical technologies, its threshold for use is low and it is particularly prone to proliferation. Because of technological gaps between countries, there is a strong likelihood that immature AGI weapons will be deployed on the battlefield, bringing enormous risks. The use of drones in recent limited wars[11] has already stimulated many small and medium-sized countries to begin procuring large quantities of drones. The low-cost equipment and technologies that AGI enables will very likely stimulate a new arms race.
Will AGI be the ultimate deterrent?
Deterrence means maintaining a capability sufficient to intimidate an adversary and prevent it from taking actions beyond its own interests. When deterrence becomes so powerful that it cannot actually be used, it becomes the ultimate deterrence, as with nuclear deterrence based on mutually assured destruction. But what ultimately decides outcomes is "human nature,"[12] the key element that war will never lack.
Without the various considerations of "human nature," would AGI become a fearsome deterrent? AGI is fast but lacks empathy, executes decisively, and the space for strategic maneuvering is compressed to an extreme degree. AGI is a critical factor on future battlefields, but because practical experience with it is lacking, accurate assessment is difficult, making it easy to overestimate adversary capabilities. Furthermore, on the question of autonomous weapons control, whether humans should be in the loop with full oversight or out of the loop with complete autonomy,[13] deep consideration is undoubtedly required. Can the authority to fire intelligent weapons be handed over to AGI? If not, the deterrent effect will be greatly diminished. If so, can human life and death truly be placed in the hands of machines that have no relation to them? In wargaming research at Cornell University,[14] large models “suddenly launched nuclear attacks,” even when operating in a neutral posture.
Perhaps one day AGI will surpass humans in capability. Will we then be unable to supervise and control it? Geoffrey Hinton, who put forward the concept of deep learning, has said he has never seen a case in which something of higher intelligence was controlled by something of lower intelligence. Some research teams believe humans may be unable to supervise superintelligent AI. Facing powerful AGI in the future, can we truly control it? This is a question worthy of deep reflection.
Will AGI change the nature of war?
With the widespread deployment of AGI, will the violent and bloody battlefield disappear? Some say that AI warfare far exceeds the range of human capability and will push humans off the battlefield entirely. When AI transforms war into confrontation conducted entirely by autonomous machines, is it still "violent and bloody warfare"? When adversaries with unequal capabilities confront each other, the weaker side may have no opportunity to act at all. Could wars be concluded before they begin, through wargaming simulations?[15] Will AGI thereby change the nature of war? Is "unmanned" "warfare" still warfare?
Yuval Noah Harari, author of Sapiens, says that all human behavior is mediated through language and shapes our history. Large language models are a representative form of AGI. What most distinguishes them from other inventions is their ability to create entirely new ideas and cultures: "Storytelling AI will change the course of human history." When AGI touches control over language, the entire civilization system constructed by humanity could be overturned, even without AGI developing consciousness. Like Plato's “Allegory of the Cave,”[16] might humans come to worship AGI as a new “deity”?
AGI builds intimate relationships with humans through human language and changes human perceptions, making it difficult for people to distinguish and identify what is real, thus creating the danger that the will to wage war could be controlled by those with malicious intent. Harari says that computers do not need to send out killer robots; if they truly need to, they will get humans to pull the trigger themselves. AGI precisely manufactures and refines situational information, controls battlefield cognition through deepfakes, can use drones to falsify battlefield conditions, and can shape public opinion before a conflict begins. Early signs of this have already appeared in recent local conflicts. War costs will thereby decline dramatically, giving rise to new forms of warfare. Will small and weak nations still have a chance? Can the will to fight be changed without bloodshed? Is "force" still a necessary condition in the definition of war?
The form of warfare may change, but its essence remains. Regardless of whether warfare is "bloody," it will still compel the enemy to submit to one's will and carry substantial "collateral damage," though the mode of confrontation may be entirely different. War's essence lies in the "human nature" at the core of human experience. "Human nature" is determined by culture, history, behavior, and values, and is very difficult to fully replicate with any artificial intelligence technology. One cannot outsource all ethical, political, and decision-making questions to AI, nor expect that AI will automatically generate "human nature." Because AI technology may be misused in moments of passion or impulse, it must remain subject to human control.[17] Since AI is trained by humans, it will never be entirely without bias, and so it cannot be wholly free from human oversight. In the future, AI can become a creative tool or partner, enhancing "tactical imagination," but it must be "aligned" to human values. These questions require continuous thinking and understanding in practice.
Will AGI overturn war theory?
Most disciplinary knowledge is expressed in natural language. Large language models, which represent a vast synthesis of human writings, can connect literary and humanistic works with scientific research in ways that would otherwise be difficult. Some have fed classical works, and even philosophy, history, political science, and economics, into large language models for analysis and reconstruction, finding that the model can conduct comprehensive analysis of all scholarly viewpoints and also put forward its "own views," not without originality. Some therefore ask: could AGI be used to re-analyze and reinterpret war theory, stimulating human innovation and driving major evolution and reconstruction of war theory and its systems? Perhaps, in theory, this could indeed lead to some improvement and development. But the science of war is not only theoretical; it is also practical, and AGI is fundamentally incapable of grasping its practical and real-world dimensions.[18] Can classical war theory truly be reinterpreted? If so, what does theory even mean?
In sum, AGI's disruption of the concept of war will far exceed that of "mechanization" or "informatization."[19] Toward the arrival of AGI, one must both boldly embrace it and maintain caution. Understanding the concept, so as not to be ignorant; studying it deeply, so as not to fall behind; strengthening oversight, so as not to be caught unaware. How to learn to cooperate with AGI, and how to guard against an adversary's AGI surprise strike,[20] this is what we must attend to first in the coming period.
Editor's Afterword: Anticipating the Future with an Open Mind[21]
Ye Chaoyang
Futurist Roy Amara made a famous observation that people tend to overestimate the short-term benefits of a technology, yet underestimate its long-term impact, later known as "Amara's Law." This law emphasizes the nonlinear character of technological development: the actual impact of technology often only fully reveals itself over longer time horizons, reflecting the rhythm and trajectory of technological development and embodying humanity's acceptance of and aspiration toward technology.
Currently, in the process of AI's development from weak AI to strong AI and from specialized AI to general-purpose AI,[22] every time people believe they have completed 90 percent of the journey, they look back and find they may have barely passed the 10 percent mark. The driving role of technological revolution on military revolution is increasingly prominent. Advanced technologies represented by AI are penetrating the military domain across multiple dimensions, causing deep transformation in the mechanisms, elements, and methods of achieving victory.
In the foreseeable future, intelligent technologies such as AGI will not stop their iterative advance. The cross-evolutionary development of intelligent technologies, and their enabling applications in the military domain, will tend toward greater diversity, perhaps breaking beyond the boundaries of humanity's current understanding of warfare. Technological development is unstoppable and no one can halt it. Whoever can use sharp eyes and a clear head to see the trends and potential of technology, and pierce the fog of war, will be better positioned to seize the initiative to victory.
This reminds us that the exploration of future warfare must be approached with a broader perspective and mindset if we are to come closer to a reality that is all too easily underestimated. Where is AGI heading? Where is intelligentized warfare heading? These questions test the wisdom of humanity.
Conclusion
What does this article tell us? At minimum, it reveals that AGI was being reasoned about as a profoundly abnormal technology within the PLA's institutional discourse, as early as January 2025.
The article is more distinctive in retrospect. PLA AI discourse in 2025 and 2026 moved toward practical intelligentization questions: DeepSeek deployment, procurement, C4ISR (command, control, communications, computers, intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance) integration, "dissipative warfare." The article's discussion of AGI as a transformative and potentially uncontrollable strategic technology, including loss-of-control risk, deterrence collapse, and civilizational disruption, did not generate a visible follow-on.
It is still important to surface, I think, because Western analysis has given this piece little attention. In general, it seems wrong to assume that no strategic thinking on AGI is taking place in China.
Acknowledgements
Thank you to Tobias Häberli, Calvin Duff, Veronika Blablová, Felix Choussat, and Tony O’Halloran for comments.
The Chinese spells out 通用人工智能 (AGI) on first use, then the article body uses the English acronym exclusively. By using the English acronym directly, the authors signal that they are discussing artificial general intelligence in the transformative sense, not general-purpose AI in the industrial diffusion sense.
The Chinese term is 赋能, meaning "to endow with capability" or "to empower." This was the characteristic vocabulary of China's digital economy policy, describing how technology upgrades and enhances existing systems. China's2024 Government Work Report used the term in this sense: "sweeping digital transformation will empower economic development" (以广泛深刻的数字变革，赋能经济发展). The term was later (eight months after this article’s publication) written directly into the targets of theAI+ Action Plan (August 2025): "by 2030, AI will comprehensively empower high-quality development" (到2030年，我国人工智能全面赋能高质量发展). The authors are thus pushing back against a merely enabling, diffusion-flavored frame here. Their answer comes in the following paragraph: "AGI's disruptive nature is entirely different" (AGI的颠覆性其实完全不同).
The original uses 网络战武器, literally "cyberwar weapons," referring to the wave of enthusiasm in the early 2000s for offensive cyberwarfare as a transformative military capability. The authors treat this as a cautionary analogy, as a technology that generated outsized expectations but more limited results in practice.
攻强守难 is a four-character set phrase meaning literally "offense strong, defense difficult." The phrase is very relevant for discussions on defensive acceleration and tech tree nondeterminism.
Quotation marks in this translation appear only where the original Chinese uses them. The authors quote certain terms to signal that they are borrowed, coined, or used with deliberate philosophical weight.
A deliberate echo of Clausewitz's concept of the fog of war (战争迷雾). The authors suggest AGI introduces a new and thicker layer of opacity on top of classical battlefield uncertainty.
The word “mine” here (挖掘) is the same word used for data mining (数据挖掘); the authors are likely invoking AGI’s capacity to extract intelligence from large volumes of data.
局部战争, literally “partial war,” is a PLA doctrinal term for wars limited in both geographic scope and political objectives, as distinct from a world war.
"Human nature" (人性) appears in quotation marks throughout the original. The authors define it later as "determined by culture, history, behavior, and values" (而"人性"是由文化、历史、行为和价值观等决定的), so not in a narrowly psychological sense, but as the full range of human moral judgment that underlies warfare.
The paper cited is "Escalation Risks from Language Models in Military and Diplomatic Decision-Making" (FAccT 2024), by researchers at Stanford, Georgia Tech, Northeastern, and the Hoover Wargaming and Crisis Simulation Initiative. It was posted as an arXiv preprint, arXiv being hosted at Cornell University, and press coverage routinely shortened this to Cornell University, an attribution the PLA Daily article follows. The finding cited is accurate; all five tested large language models showed escalatory behavior, and some executed nuclear strikes even when assigned a neutral posture in the simulation.
兵棋推演 is the standard Chinese term for military wargaming exercises, used for operational planning, training, and strategic assessment. The authors are asking whether AGI-powered wargaming could, in theory, determine the outcome of a conflict before any fighting begins.
Plato's allegory of the cave describes prisoners who mistake shadows on a cave wall for reality, having never seen anything else. The analogy here may be that if AGI gains control over language and culture, humans might similarly mistake AGI-generated representations for reality, and come to treat AGI itself as a higher authority.
I found the causal logic here quite strange. The authors cite the risk of AI being misused through human passion or impulse as a reason to keep AI under human control.
战争科学不仅具有理论性，而且还具有实践性，但实践性、现实性却是AGI根本做不到的。Here the authors are drawing on a distinction between theoretical knowledge and practical wisdom. AGI can analyze and synthesize war theory, but cannot have the embodied practical experience of war itself. This connects to their broader argument about "human nature," that even in fully automated warfare, the purposes and moral stakes of war remain irreducibly human.
"Mechanization" (机械化) and "informatization" (信息化) are stages in a framework of military modernization that runs through Chinese strategic discourse. Mechanization refers to the integration of motorized and armored systems, associated with industrial-age warfare. Informatization refers to the integration of information and communications technology into military systems, a concept with roots in the 1990s that remains current in Chinese military writing. The authors position intelligentization (智能化, AI-driven warfare) as the third and most disruptive stage of this progression.
突袭 is a military term for a sudden ambush-style attack. The authors are not describing a competitive or technological surprise but a deliberate adversarial strike exploiting AGI capabilities.
Here Ye Chaoyang uses 通用人工智能 without the English acronym, reverting to the Chinese characters the article body had set aside. The translation renders this instance as "general-purpose AI" rather than "AGI" to reflect the ambiguity.
There are gestures toward the need for contemplation, but no direct acknowledgement of the assumptions made about AGI and the possibility that they're wrong. Why?
Source
“Reflections on Warfare Brought by AGI” (AGI带来的战争思考)
Source: PLA Daily (解放军报)
Date: January 21, 2025
Authors: Rong Ming (荣明), Hu Xiaofeng (胡晓峰)
Introduction
Please feel free to skip to the translation, about halfway down, though I would recommend reading the sections “On the source” and "On the Authors" just above it too.
In November 2024, the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission recommended that “Congress establish and fund a Manhattan Project-like program dedicated to racing to and acquiring an Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) capability.” The United States increasingly treats advanced AI as a strategic imperative, and China is frequently invoked as a reason to race. The broader framing of AI competition as a race between great powers reflects an assumption that China is a peer competitor in pursuing AGI.
But is China pursuing AGI? The prevailing expert view says no. China's August 2025 AI+ Action Plan reads as diffusion-first industrial policy, with adoption targets of 70 percent by 2027 and 90 percent by 2030, not frontier ambitions. In a June 2025 paper, "The Most Dangerous Fiction: The Rhetoric and Reality of the AI Race," Cambridge researcher Seán Ó hÉigeartaigh argued that there was little evidence of a top-down Chinese AGI effort, and that the narrative served Western corporate interests. He also noted the translation ambiguity of 通用人工智能, which can mean either "artificial general intelligence" or "general-purpose AI." But Ó hÉigeartaigh acknowledged a significant limitation to his analysis, namely that he had no visibility into China's defense sector. RAND researcher Kyle Chan reached similar conclusions in a February 2026 analysis, "Does China Care About AGI?", reinforcing that Chinese policy documents rarely referenced AGI and noting that President Xi's April 2025 Politburo study session did not mention the term.
The most prominent challenge to this consensus gets the correction wrong. In October 2025, researcher Matthew Johnson at Jamestown argued that AGI has "quietly become central" to Beijing's strategy. But this analysis rested heavily on references to 通用人工智能 in policy documents without adequately grappling with the translation ambiguity. Much of the evidence Johnson cited was more consistent with the general-purpose AI reading than the AGI reading.
The picture from Western analysis, then, is that the Chinese government does not prioritize AGI as a strategic objective. Yet the country's private sector complicates this narrative. As Kyle Chan has documented, DeepSeek's founder Liang Wenfeng has stated "Our destination is AGI," and Zhipu's CEO Zhang Peng has said the company was founded to "explore what AGI ultimately is." These ambitions run up against compute realities. At the AGI-Next Summit at Tsinghua University in January 2026, Alibaba's Qwen team lead Lin Junyang acknowledged that US labs operate with one to two orders of magnitude more compute than their Chinese counterparts, a gap corroborated by Epoch AI's tracking of global AI supercomputer capacity. China's AI labs want some notion of AGI but realize they are severely resource constrained.
Correctly gauging China's AGI ambitions and the government's situational awareness has concrete policy consequences. If the US overestimates them, it risks unnecessary escalation. If it underestimates China's strategic awareness, it risks being caught off guard. For instance, how we characterize China's AI ambitions shapes whether compute governance is treated as a serious national security tool or dismissed as trade protectionism.
One underexploited source for this question is China's military discourse. Last year, in January 2025, PLA Daily published "Reflections on Warfare Brought by AGI" (AGI带来的战争思考), a full-page article by Rong Ming and Hu Xiaofeng that engages precisely these questions. The article was briefly noted in the Center for China Analysis's PLA Watch newsletter in March 2025. It has not otherwise received sustained analysis or translation in Western policy outlets. A partial translation appeared on the specialist blog Red Dragon 1949 in January 2026, a full year after publication, containing errors.
I have been sitting on this for a while, hoping to place it in the context of a larger project on Chinese thinking on AGI. That project is taking longer than expected. In the meantime, this piece has been gathering dust, and I think it is better in the community than in my notes. I am publishing a translation here, produced with AI assistance and edited for faithfulness and footnoted by me.
On the source
PLA Daily (解放军报) is the official newspaper of the Chinese People's Liberation Army, founded in 1956. Its readership is primarily active-duty PLA and People's Armed Police personnel, though it has been publicly distributed since 1987. Its contents are editorially reviewed for alignment with military and party positions.
“Reflections on Warfare Brought by AGI” appeared on page 7 of the January 21, 2025 issue, in the Military Forum (军事论坛) section, beneath the standing banner "Study Military Affairs, Study War, Study Fighting" (研究军事、研究战争、研究打仗), a Xi Jinping directive that PLA Daily displays prominently. It is part of the "Perspectives on Intelligentized Warfare" (智能化战争面面观) column, which had run for over 70 installments by April 2023. ("Intelligentized warfare" is a translation of a Chinese term of art; "intelligentized" is awkward in English but is the standard rendering in Western scholarship on PLA doctrine.)
The article is online at 81.cn (81 refers to August 1st, the PLA's founding date and the basis of Army Day), and mirrored at Xinhua, Sina Military, and Guangming Daily. A PDF of the complete issue was previously available (I had last visited in March, I believe) at https://rmt-static-publish.81.cn/file/20250121/1d8217bd734a96b191cf7d33a81fe782.pdf but that link is now dead.
On the authors
Rong Ming and Hu Xiaofeng are both affiliated with the College of Joint Operations at China's National Defense University, the PLA's highest military academic institution, directly under the Central Military Commission (CMC) and responsible for training the military's most senior commanders.
Hu Xiaofeng is a figure worth understanding. He is a professor and senior engineer who held the rank of Major General, and the chief designer of the PLA's first large-scale computer wargaming system. He has published more than ten monographs and received multiple National Science and Technology Progress Awards. Xi Jinping, as CMC Chairman, personally signed the order awarding him a military merit citation. His audio course on the science of war had accumulated over 33 million plays on the PLA's professional education platform as of 2020. When Hu Xiaofeng writes about AGI in PLA Daily, it is not futurism.
Translation
Reflections on Warfare Brought by AGI (AGI带来的战争思考)
Rong Ming, Hu Xiaofeng
Editor's Note
Science and technology and warfare are always intertwined. While technological innovation continuously changes the face of war, it has not changed war's violent nature or its coercive purpose. In recent years, as artificial intelligence (AI) technology has developed and been applied rapidly, debate about its impact on warfare has never stopped. Compared to AI, artificial general intelligence (AGI)[1] represents a higher level of intelligence and is considered a form of intelligence on par with that of humans. How will the emergence of AGI affect warfare? Will it change war's violent and coercive character? This article explores these questions together with the reader.
Is AGI merely an enabling[2] technology?
Many believe that, although large models and generative AI demonstrate powerful military potential that prefigures future AGI, they are ultimately only enabling technologies. They can only optimize and enhance existing weapons and equipment, making them smarter and improving operational efficiency, but cannot bring about a true military revolution. This is somewhat like cyberwarfare capabilities,[3] which when they first appeared were placed in high hopes by many countries, but which now seem, in retrospect, to have been genuinely somewhat exaggerated.
AGI's disruptive nature is entirely different. It brings enormous changes to the battlefield with reaction speeds and breadth of knowledge far exceeding human capability. More importantly, it produces enormous disruptive results by accelerating scientific and technological progress. On future battlefields, autonomous weapons will be endowed with advanced intelligence by AGI, their performance universally enhanced, and by virtue of their speed and swarm advantages, become strong in offense and difficult to defend against[4]. At that point, the high-intelligence autonomous weapons that some scientists once predicted will become reality, with AGI playing a key role. Current military applications of AI include autonomous weapons, intelligence analysis, intelligent decision-making, intelligent training, and intelligent logistics support, and these applications are difficult to summarize simply as mere "enabling."[5] Moreover, AGI develops rapidly with short iteration cycles and is in a state of continuous evolution. In future operations, AGI must be treated as a priority, with particular attention to the changes it may bring.
Will AGI make war disappear?
The historian Geoffrey Blainey[6] argued that wars always occur because of mistaken assessments of each side's strength or will. With AGI's application in military affairs, miscalculation will become less frequent. Some scholars therefore speculate that war will decrease or disappear as a result. In practice, AGI can indeed reduce a great deal of miscalculation, but even so it cannot eliminate all uncertainty, since uncertainty is one of war's defining characteristics. Moreover, not all wars arise from miscalculation, and AGI's inherent unpredictability and opacity, combined with humanity's lack of practical experience in using AGI, will introduce new uncertainties, plunging people into an ever thicker "artificial intelligence fog."[7]
AGI algorithms also present a problem for rationality.[8] Some scholars argue that AGI’s capability to mine[9] critical intelligence and generate precise predictions has a dual effect. At a practical operational level, AGI does make fewer mistakes than humans and can improve intelligence accuracy, helping to reduce miscalculation; but it may also make humans blindly overconfident, inciting them to take desperate gambles.[10] The offensive advantage brought by AGI means the optimal defensive strategy becomes striking first, breaking the balance between offense and defense, triggering new security dilemmas, and actually increasing the risk of war.
AGI is highly general-purpose and easily integrated with weapons systems. Unlike nuclear, biological, and chemical technologies, its threshold for use is low and it is particularly prone to proliferation. Because of technological gaps between countries, there is a strong likelihood that immature AGI weapons will be deployed on the battlefield, bringing enormous risks. The use of drones in recent limited wars[11] has already stimulated many small and medium-sized countries to begin procuring large quantities of drones. The low-cost equipment and technologies that AGI enables will very likely stimulate a new arms race.
Will AGI be the ultimate deterrent?
Deterrence means maintaining a capability sufficient to intimidate an adversary and prevent it from taking actions beyond its own interests. When deterrence becomes so powerful that it cannot actually be used, it becomes the ultimate deterrence, as with nuclear deterrence based on mutually assured destruction. But what ultimately decides outcomes is "human nature,"[12] the key element that war will never lack.
Without the various considerations of "human nature," would AGI become a fearsome deterrent? AGI is fast but lacks empathy, executes decisively, and the space for strategic maneuvering is compressed to an extreme degree. AGI is a critical factor on future battlefields, but because practical experience with it is lacking, accurate assessment is difficult, making it easy to overestimate adversary capabilities. Furthermore, on the question of autonomous weapons control, whether humans should be in the loop with full oversight or out of the loop with complete autonomy,[13] deep consideration is undoubtedly required. Can the authority to fire intelligent weapons be handed over to AGI? If not, the deterrent effect will be greatly diminished. If so, can human life and death truly be placed in the hands of machines that have no relation to them? In wargaming research at Cornell University,[14] large models “suddenly launched nuclear attacks,” even when operating in a neutral posture.
Perhaps one day AGI will surpass humans in capability. Will we then be unable to supervise and control it? Geoffrey Hinton, who put forward the concept of deep learning, has said he has never seen a case in which something of higher intelligence was controlled by something of lower intelligence. Some research teams believe humans may be unable to supervise superintelligent AI. Facing powerful AGI in the future, can we truly control it? This is a question worthy of deep reflection.
Will AGI change the nature of war?
With the widespread deployment of AGI, will the violent and bloody battlefield disappear? Some say that AI warfare far exceeds the range of human capability and will push humans off the battlefield entirely. When AI transforms war into confrontation conducted entirely by autonomous machines, is it still "violent and bloody warfare"? When adversaries with unequal capabilities confront each other, the weaker side may have no opportunity to act at all. Could wars be concluded before they begin, through wargaming simulations?[15] Will AGI thereby change the nature of war? Is "unmanned" "warfare" still warfare?
Yuval Noah Harari, author of Sapiens, says that all human behavior is mediated through language and shapes our history. Large language models are a representative form of AGI. What most distinguishes them from other inventions is their ability to create entirely new ideas and cultures: "Storytelling AI will change the course of human history." When AGI touches control over language, the entire civilization system constructed by humanity could be overturned, even without AGI developing consciousness. Like Plato's “Allegory of the Cave,”[16] might humans come to worship AGI as a new “deity”?
AGI builds intimate relationships with humans through human language and changes human perceptions, making it difficult for people to distinguish and identify what is real, thus creating the danger that the will to wage war could be controlled by those with malicious intent. Harari says that computers do not need to send out killer robots; if they truly need to, they will get humans to pull the trigger themselves. AGI precisely manufactures and refines situational information, controls battlefield cognition through deepfakes, can use drones to falsify battlefield conditions, and can shape public opinion before a conflict begins. Early signs of this have already appeared in recent local conflicts. War costs will thereby decline dramatically, giving rise to new forms of warfare. Will small and weak nations still have a chance? Can the will to fight be changed without bloodshed? Is "force" still a necessary condition in the definition of war?
The form of warfare may change, but its essence remains. Regardless of whether warfare is "bloody," it will still compel the enemy to submit to one's will and carry substantial "collateral damage," though the mode of confrontation may be entirely different. War's essence lies in the "human nature" at the core of human experience. "Human nature" is determined by culture, history, behavior, and values, and is very difficult to fully replicate with any artificial intelligence technology. One cannot outsource all ethical, political, and decision-making questions to AI, nor expect that AI will automatically generate "human nature." Because AI technology may be misused in moments of passion or impulse, it must remain subject to human control.[17] Since AI is trained by humans, it will never be entirely without bias, and so it cannot be wholly free from human oversight. In the future, AI can become a creative tool or partner, enhancing "tactical imagination," but it must be "aligned" to human values. These questions require continuous thinking and understanding in practice.
Will AGI overturn war theory?
Most disciplinary knowledge is expressed in natural language. Large language models, which represent a vast synthesis of human writings, can connect literary and humanistic works with scientific research in ways that would otherwise be difficult. Some have fed classical works, and even philosophy, history, political science, and economics, into large language models for analysis and reconstruction, finding that the model can conduct comprehensive analysis of all scholarly viewpoints and also put forward its "own views," not without originality. Some therefore ask: could AGI be used to re-analyze and reinterpret war theory, stimulating human innovation and driving major evolution and reconstruction of war theory and its systems? Perhaps, in theory, this could indeed lead to some improvement and development. But the science of war is not only theoretical; it is also practical, and AGI is fundamentally incapable of grasping its practical and real-world dimensions.[18] Can classical war theory truly be reinterpreted? If so, what does theory even mean?
In sum, AGI's disruption of the concept of war will far exceed that of "mechanization" or "informatization."[19] Toward the arrival of AGI, one must both boldly embrace it and maintain caution. Understanding the concept, so as not to be ignorant; studying it deeply, so as not to fall behind; strengthening oversight, so as not to be caught unaware. How to learn to cooperate with AGI, and how to guard against an adversary's AGI surprise strike,[20] this is what we must attend to first in the coming period.
Editor's Afterword: Anticipating the Future with an Open Mind[21]
Ye Chaoyang
Futurist Roy Amara made a famous observation that people tend to overestimate the short-term benefits of a technology, yet underestimate its long-term impact, later known as "Amara's Law." This law emphasizes the nonlinear character of technological development: the actual impact of technology often only fully reveals itself over longer time horizons, reflecting the rhythm and trajectory of technological development and embodying humanity's acceptance of and aspiration toward technology.
Currently, in the process of AI's development from weak AI to strong AI and from specialized AI to general-purpose AI,[22] every time people believe they have completed 90 percent of the journey, they look back and find they may have barely passed the 10 percent mark. The driving role of technological revolution on military revolution is increasingly prominent. Advanced technologies represented by AI are penetrating the military domain across multiple dimensions, causing deep transformation in the mechanisms, elements, and methods of achieving victory.
In the foreseeable future, intelligent technologies such as AGI will not stop their iterative advance. The cross-evolutionary development of intelligent technologies, and their enabling applications in the military domain, will tend toward greater diversity, perhaps breaking beyond the boundaries of humanity's current understanding of warfare. Technological development is unstoppable and no one can halt it. Whoever can use sharp eyes and a clear head to see the trends and potential of technology, and pierce the fog of war, will be better positioned to seize the initiative to victory.
This reminds us that the exploration of future warfare must be approached with a broader perspective and mindset if we are to come closer to a reality that is all too easily underestimated. Where is AGI heading? Where is intelligentized warfare heading? These questions test the wisdom of humanity.
Conclusion
What does this article tell us? At minimum, it reveals that AGI was being reasoned about as a profoundly abnormal technology within the PLA's institutional discourse, as early as January 2025.
The article is more distinctive in retrospect. PLA AI discourse in 2025 and 2026 moved toward practical intelligentization questions: DeepSeek deployment, procurement, C4ISR (command, control, communications, computers, intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance) integration, "dissipative warfare." The article's discussion of AGI as a transformative and potentially uncontrollable strategic technology, including loss-of-control risk, deterrence collapse, and civilizational disruption, did not generate a visible follow-on.
It is still important to surface, I think, because Western analysis has given this piece little attention. In general, it seems wrong to assume that no strategic thinking on AGI is taking place in China.
Acknowledgements
Thank you to Tobias Häberli, Calvin Duff, Veronika Blablová, Felix Choussat, and Tony O’Halloran for comments.
The Chinese spells out 通用人工智能 (AGI) on first use, then the article body uses the English acronym exclusively. By using the English acronym directly, the authors signal that they are discussing artificial general intelligence in the transformative sense, not general-purpose AI in the industrial diffusion sense.
The Chinese term is 赋能, meaning "to endow with capability" or "to empower." This was the characteristic vocabulary of China's digital economy policy, describing how technology upgrades and enhances existing systems. China's 2024 Government Work Report used the term in this sense: "sweeping digital transformation will empower economic development" (以广泛深刻的数字变革，赋能经济发展). The term was later (eight months after this article’s publication) written directly into the targets of the AI+ Action Plan (August 2025): "by 2030, AI will comprehensively empower high-quality development" (到2030年，我国人工智能全面赋能高质量发展). The authors are thus pushing back against a merely enabling, diffusion-flavored frame here. Their answer comes in the following paragraph: "AGI's disruptive nature is entirely different" (AGI的颠覆性其实完全不同).
The original uses 网络战武器, literally "cyberwar weapons," referring to the wave of enthusiasm in the early 2000s for offensive cyberwarfare as a transformative military capability. The authors treat this as a cautionary analogy, as a technology that generated outsized expectations but more limited results in practice.
攻强守难 is a four-character set phrase meaning literally "offense strong, defense difficult." The phrase is very relevant for discussions on defensive acceleration and tech tree nondeterminism.
Quotation marks in this translation appear only where the original Chinese uses them. The authors quote certain terms to signal that they are borrowed, coined, or used with deliberate philosophical weight.
Geoffrey Blainey is an Australian historian, author of The Causes of War (1973).
A deliberate echo of Clausewitz's concept of the fog of war (战争迷雾). The authors suggest AGI introduces a new and thicker layer of opacity on top of classical battlefield uncertainty.
理性难题, literally "rationality problem." The authors are not claiming AGI itself is irrational, but that its presence distorts human rationality.
The word “mine” here (挖掘) is the same word used for data mining (数据挖掘); the authors are likely invoking AGI’s capacity to extract intelligence from large volumes of data.
The original uses the four-character idiom 铤而走险, which describes taking a dangerous risk out of desperation or when left with no other option.
局部战争, literally “partial war,” is a PLA doctrinal term for wars limited in both geographic scope and political objectives, as distinct from a world war.
"Human nature" (人性) appears in quotation marks throughout the original. The authors define it later as "determined by culture, history, behavior, and values" (而"人性"是由文化、历史、行为和价值观等决定的), so not in a narrowly psychological sense, but as the full range of human moral judgment that underlies warfare.
人在环内 / 人在环外 maps directly onto the English terminology "human in the loop / human out of the loop."
The paper cited is "Escalation Risks from Language Models in Military and Diplomatic Decision-Making" (FAccT 2024), by researchers at Stanford, Georgia Tech, Northeastern, and the Hoover Wargaming and Crisis Simulation Initiative. It was posted as an arXiv preprint, arXiv being hosted at Cornell University, and press coverage routinely shortened this to Cornell University, an attribution the PLA Daily article follows. The finding cited is accurate; all five tested large language models showed escalatory behavior, and some executed nuclear strikes even when assigned a neutral posture in the simulation.
兵棋推演 is the standard Chinese term for military wargaming exercises, used for operational planning, training, and strategic assessment. The authors are asking whether AGI-powered wargaming could, in theory, determine the outcome of a conflict before any fighting begins.
Plato's allegory of the cave describes prisoners who mistake shadows on a cave wall for reality, having never seen anything else. The analogy here may be that if AGI gains control over language and culture, humans might similarly mistake AGI-generated representations for reality, and come to treat AGI itself as a higher authority.
I found the causal logic here quite strange. The authors cite the risk of AI being misused through human passion or impulse as a reason to keep AI under human control.
战争科学不仅具有理论性，而且还具有实践性，但实践性、现实性却是AGI根本做不到的。Here the authors are drawing on a distinction between theoretical knowledge and practical wisdom. AGI can analyze and synthesize war theory, but cannot have the embodied practical experience of war itself. This connects to their broader argument about "human nature," that even in fully automated warfare, the purposes and moral stakes of war remain irreducibly human.
"Mechanization" (机械化) and "informatization" (信息化) are stages in a framework of military modernization that runs through Chinese strategic discourse. Mechanization refers to the integration of motorized and armored systems, associated with industrial-age warfare. Informatization refers to the integration of information and communications technology into military systems, a concept with roots in the 1990s that remains current in Chinese military writing. The authors position intelligentization (智能化, AI-driven warfare) as the third and most disruptive stage of this progression.
突袭 is a military term for a sudden ambush-style attack. The authors are not describing a competitive or technological surprise but a deliberate adversarial strike exploiting AGI capabilities.
The afterword is signed by Ye Chaoyang, the column editor, not the authors.
Here Ye Chaoyang uses 通用人工智能 without the English acronym, reverting to the Chinese characters the article body had set aside. The translation renders this instance as "general-purpose AI" rather than "AGI" to reflect the ambiguity.