An Exploration of AI and Power Transition Theory

Renewed great power competition, driven by the rise of China, coincides with mounting concern over artificial intelligence and its anticipated impact across the military, economic, and political domains. Yet scholarship struggles to specify how AI bears on the strategic rivalry between the United States and China, tending to treat it as a discrete capability or a sectoral phenomenon rather than a factor that reshapes the sources of power itself. This paper argues that power transition theory is well suited to close that gap. Because the theory already conceives of power as generated through demographic, economic, and political capacity, a general-purpose technology like AI that acts on those very inputs becomes a natural object of analysis. The paper develops this pairing conceptually, clarifying how AI may reshape the trajectories of capacity change that power transition theory places at the center of transition.