NDC Insight 08-2026 – Future Series by Anselm Küsters and Marius Strubenhoff 1
Executive summary
China’s pursuit of “intelligentized warfare” has become a central concern for NATO member states, whose 2022 Strategic Concept identified China as presenting systemic challenges. How ever, assessments of Beijing’s military AI trajectory often rest on anecdote. To fill this gap, this study conducts a large‑scale computational analysis of China’s own documentary record from 2000 to 2025, including:
1 legal and strategic texts providing the formal doctrinal baseline;
2 Chinese AI research publications tracing the technical discourse;
3 Media coverage (People’s Daily), capturing propaganda and public signalling; and
4 PLA-linked procurement and defence-industrialcontracts.
Based on the empirical results and our literature review, four core findings emerge:
First, sentiment analysis of state media consistently shows high positivity around military AI. Moreover, AI-military salience and positive tones are increasingly coupled after 2023. The more a particular text addresses the topic, the more its tone is positive. Taken together, this indicates a deliberately optimistic propaganda strategy.
Second, LLM‑based classification of AI and military concepts across corpora reveals that surveillance dominates as the primary application of military AI…
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Anselm Küsters is Scientific Director for the Nordic Countries and Head of the Department of Digitalisation and AI at the Centre for European Policy (cep). He also works in the field of Digital Humanities as an affiliated researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Legal History and Legal Theory in Frank furt am Main and as a post-doctoral researcher (Habilitand) at the Humboldt University in Berlin.
Marius Strubenhoff works as a policy analyst at the Centre for European Policy, where he reports on EU foreign and security policy issues and French policy towardsthe EU. 1↩︎
NATO Defense College