The attack - and that's the right word for it - was launched in October. The latest developments are signals that more US allies will sign up. The Netherlands, in particular, would hardly have been interested in cooperating if President Xi had not shown the world so clearly that China was a threat.

AI is important because it will greatly accelerate economic development - which, in the end, just means making us richer and our lives better. There's plenty of reason to worry about the disruption it will cause, too.

Most people pay little attention to this stuff. It's rather like when we hear the job title of someone who works in information technology. Some of us will persist a little in trying to understand exactly what that job is, and the rest will say "So it has something to do with computers" and change the subject.

But we had better pay attention to China's push into AI, because if it can beat the rest of the world in that race it will enormously strengthen its already excessive power and influence.

That, of course, is exactly what it has been trying to do. In 2017 it set a target to be the global leader in AI by 2030. With the power of a government that can freely throw taxpayers' money at projects, it has already made tremendous progress.

AI will have applications in replacing people or improving their performance in innumerable fields: in medicine, entertainment, transportation (as in self-driving cars), commerce and in the development of information technology itself. Authoritarian governments will also use it for social control.

We already have a hard enough time resisting China's ability to use its economic power to influence other countries. But if Chinese companies, always subject to control by the Chinese Communist Party, have the strongest AI, they will dominate international markets.

Maybe the best way to imagine this is to recall Britain's dominance in the middle of the 19th century, when its application of steam and iron technology had left everyone else in the dust, and its companies bestrode the planet. But notice that British companies in 1850 were not part of a great coordinated mechanism directed by a Leninist dictatorship in London.

AI will turbocharge the power of so-called online platforms - those big internet services such as Google, Facebook and TikTok (which is Chinese). If the CCP can control such services, its capacity for international influence will soar.

Don't think we'd be immune to brainwashing by foreign authoritarians. Already plenty of Australians watch RT television without knowing that they're soaking up Russian propaganda.

AI will have particular importance in military affairs - for example, in systems for finding and identifying targets, or in autonomous weapons, such as little submarines that will have no one aboard but be able to do many tasks just as well as crewed submarines.

The democracies absolutely cannot let China lead in AI.

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And it turns out that they have an ace in the hole: developing and applying AI ultimately relies on US technology. As Chinese AI efforts have proceeded over the years, the US could at any time have strangled them. In October it began to do so.

It should have moved long ago, but, anyway, we can thank Xi for showing China's aggressive colours over the past decade and goading Washington into action.

AI needs microprocessor chips of the highest performance. China cannot make them and can no longer buy them from the US.

It won't easily be able to design its own, because the software for that purpose is American. Chinese companies will keep using the software they already have access to, but they won't get updates.

When they do design super-fast chips, they won't be able to make them, because performing that intricate process requires US equipment, which is no longer supplied. Also, a non-US company cannot now use its American equipment to make advanced chips for China.

US machines already in China will be deprived of maintenance support, so eventually they'll conk out.

China won't be able to get US parts for building its own manufacturing machines, either.

In all this, the US could use a little help from its friends, and, again thanks to the world's belated awareness of China's hostility, is getting it.

A British company, Arm, is one of the world's major designers of chips. The British government has not directly banned it from selling its latest high-performance designs to China, but the company says it will not try, because it has judged, no doubt correctly, that it is unlikely to get permission.

A Japanese company, Tokyo Electron, supplies advanced chip manufacturing equipment, but the US is trying to get Japan to clamp down on such exports to China. An influential member of the ruling Liberal Democratic Party has thrown his weight behind Japan doing so.

And a Dutch company, ASML, supplies technology and machines for the process of printing the tiny circuits on chips. Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte told Bloomberg this month he expected to come to an agreement with the US on export controls.

None of this will prevent China from eventually making its own way in AI. But Washington's unusually aggressive action has for a while left the Chinese industry stranded - and hopefully far from achieving the national goal of leading the world.