29 January 2026

The US AI Acceleration Plan Vs China’s Diffusion Model

Shannon Vaughn

The latest US Artificial Intelligence Strategy is a meaningful policy shift and should not be treated as just another vision document. It is an attempt to rewire how the Department of War builds, plans, tests, accredits, and scales capability around a single premise: in the AI era, the side that learns and fields the fastest wins.

From the perspective of US-China competition, the significance is not simply that Washington wants more AI. It is that the department is now treating AI adoption as an operational race in which the decisive variable is diffusion—how quickly a promising capability moves from experiment to trusted, fielded use across the services, commands, and enabling enterprise that actually fights.

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