“Engineers studying drone combat at one of China's top military-linked universities needed a way to simulate clashes between drone swarms in real time. They turned to nature for inspiration.
Observing how hawks select prey, they trained defensive drones to single out and destroy the most vulnerable enemy aircraft. On the other side, the attacking drones were taught how to dodge the hawk-trained defenders based on the behavior of doves. In a five-on-five test, the hawks destroyed all the doves in 5.3 seconds.
That research earned the engineers a patent in April 2024 -- one of hundreds granted in recent years to Chinese defense companies and universities affiliated with the military for advances in swarm intelligence.
In the artificial intelligence Cold War emerging between the U.S. and China, military use of the technology has quickly become one of the hottest areas of competition. It's also one of the most hazardous, with the desire to gain an edge putting pressure on commanders to turn over more and more warfighting power to machines.
Patent filings, government procurement tenders and research papers reviewed by The Wall Street Journal reveal that China's military, the People's Liberation Army, is intensely focused on harnessing AI to deploy swarms of drones, robot dogs and other autonomous systems. The idea is that they could overwhelm enemies or erect impenetrable defenses against threats with minimal human input.
The AI era will usher in a new style of warfighting "driven by algorithms, with unmanned systems as the main fighting force and swarm operations as the primary mode of combat," a group of Chinese military theorists wrote in October 2024. They likened AI's potential to transform the military to gunpowder, a technology invented in China but more effectively weaponized, many in China believe, by others.
Drones, for their part, have emerged as key weapons on the battlefields of Ukraine, where strategies and technology for their use have developed quickly under the pressure of real fighting.
Drone swarms can be used as decoys that can force an enemy to burn through munitions, as spies and as devastating weapons that can take out enemy soldiers and tanks in suicide missions.
Marrying AI with robots allows China to exploit its advantage in hardware, with Chinese factories already capable of pumping out a million or more cheap, capable drones every year -- something the U.S. hasn't been able to do. With its weaker tech supply chain, the U.S. produces drones in the tens of thousands, and at prices many times higher.
Flaunting that advantage, China's state broadcaster in 2024 released footage of Swarm 1, a truck-mounted system capable of launching as many as 48 fixed-wing drones at a time. It said multiple trucks could be used to launch swarms of up to 200 drones capable of splitting up to carry out coordinated tasks, including reconnaissance, strikes and deception.
The Jiutian, a hulking mother ship drone designed to release swarms of smaller drones, completed its maiden flight in December, according to state media. That came after the PLA displayed a pack of "robot wolves" -- bulked up, weaponized versions of robot dogs -- in a military parade in September. In an interview with state media, their maker, state-owned China South Industries Group, said the company is working on ways to link wolf packs with aerial swarms to create "a new model of efficient collaborative combat."
Swarm intelligence also offers an enticing solution to a long-running concern for the PLA over the competence of rank-and-file soldiers and their commanders, who haven't fought a war since the late 1970s.
"At a tactical level, for concrete missions, there's a growing consensus [in Chinese military writings] that autonomous systems have the potential to perform better than humans," said Sunny Cheung, an open-source intelligence expert at the Washington think tank Jamestown Foundation.
China's Ministry of Defense didn't respond to requests for comment.
The approach comes with risks for China. PLA engineers could fail to get the technology to work in a real wartime scenario, making China's robot squadrons easy for enemies to pick off or disable.
Or the AI could work too well, and make deadly decisions outside the understanding or control of human commanders.
In fact, lessons from Ukraine, where signal jamming makes it increasingly difficult for human soldiers to control drones remotely, have reinforced for the PLA the value of drones that carry out orders on their own, military analysts say.
Militaries around the world are intrigued by the potential of advanced self-teaching forms of AI, like those that underpin ChatGPT, to improve everything from logistics to battlefield analysis and combat. Actual use of the technology by militaries is still in its infancy and is shrouded in secrecy.
Research papers, patent filings and military bid tenders -- which Chinese government agencies make public so companies can bid to supply them -- offer a glimpse into what the PLA is pursuing.
One bid tender posted to a PLA-managed procurement platform in 2024, among many acquired by Georgetown University's Center for Security and Emerging Technology, outlined a mobile cognitive warfare system to create AI-driven deepfake videos and broadcast them via laser onto buildings.
The tender also requested a "consciousness intervention system" mounted on an unmanned ground vehicle to blast targets with sound at decibel levels nearly high enough to rupture ear drums.
The tender for the mobile cognitive warfare unit reads like a "fever dream" of Chinese military AI ambitions, said Sam Bresnick, a research fellow at CSET. "The idea is, 'Can some company deliver this kind of thing and then can we produce it at scale?'"
Competition between the American and Chinese militaries over drone swarms dates back at least a decade. In 2015, a single pilot successfully controlled 50 drones at one time in a test at the Naval Postgraduate School in California, setting a world record. A state-run Chinese defense company broke the record the next year. The pattern repeated in 2017.
Those early demonstrations were rudimentary, with the drones able to fly together at a set distance and little else. Today, drones used on the battlefield in Ukraine and Gaza are faster, more maneuverable and developing the ability to track and destroy targets on their own.
A recent surge of research into drone intelligence is producing a stream of new or updated algorithms, many of them modeled on the behavior of animal groups, that theoretically give large numbers of drones rules for how to act and react in concert to carry out a mission.
The trick is getting those algorithms to work on actual drones in realistic battlefield scenarios, said Justin Bradley, an expert in aerospace engineering at North Carolina State University who specializes in autonomous systems.
Current systems are forced to rely almost entirely on radio communication between drones that is easily disrupted by electronic warfare.
The hawk vs. dove simulation -- run by researchers at Beihang University --reflects what American drone experts say are the strengths and weaknesses of China's pursuit of swarm intelligence.
The research, detailed in an academic paper and a patent application, included more sophisticated modeling that reflects how drones actually fly, compared with other animal-inspired models that assume simpler styles of movement. As with a lot of Chinese work on swarm intelligence, it was a relatively minor advance that's unlikely to turn heads in the U.S., according to Bradley, but the simulation reflects the country's practical focus on making swarm combat actually work. Beihang University didn't respond to a request for comment.
Other work by Chinese researchers takes a similar approach, tweaking algorithms based on the behavior of ants, sheep, coyotes and whales to eke out theoretical improvements in the ability of unmanned systems to collaborate. Speaking at a drone conference in Beijing in July, the Beihang professor who led the university's hawk-dove swarm simulation, Duan Haibin, said Chinese researchers were also trying to simulate the eyes of eagles and fruit flies in search of a solution to drones' perception problems.
Since the start of 2022, Chinese defense contractors, military institutes and military-linked universities have published at least 930 patent filings related to swarm intelligence. There have been only around 60 such patents published in the U.S. over the same period, and at least 10 of those were filed by Chinese entities.
The discrepancy partly stems from the much heavier emphasis Chinese university science departments put on patent filings in judging academic performance. But it also reflects differences in approach, said Stacie Pettyjohn, a senior fellow and director of the Defense Program at the Center for a New American Security.
For China, which is home to factories that pump out more than 80% of the world's small drones, it makes more sense to pursue swarms. "China is very focused on figuring out ways to be able to deliver and employ a lot of smart, small drones just because that is something that is widely available to them," she said.
China's dominance of the drone supply chain makes it difficult for the U.S. to build its own arsenal of cheap unmanned systems, since reliance on affordable Chinese parts would make American drones vulnerable to hacking or supply disruptions.
The Pentagon is nevertheless striving to close the gap with China. It recently deployed a new long-range kamikaze drone that costs $35,000, a price point drone experts say is surprisingly affordable.
Western drone makers are also experimenting with swarms. Auterion, a startup with offices in Virginia and Munich, demonstrated its swarm technology on quadcopter drones during U.S. Army training exercises in Hawaii in November. At one point, the company launched seven drones simultaneously, with two peeling off in a simulated suicide strike.
Pettyjohn said the U.S. is more focused on improving the autonomy of individual drones that can work in a team with human soldiers and pilots, which plays to strengths of the U.S. military's decentralized combat units.” [1]
Now all units are decentralized otherwise they are easily killed off with help of drones.
Will the Chinese sell drone parts to Americans to kill the Chinese in Taiwan?
It is highly unlikely and contrary to current geopolitical realities and national policies that China would knowingly sell military components to the United States for use in weapons systems directed against Chinese forces in a conflict over Taiwan
.
Here's a breakdown of the current situation:
Political Hostility: China considers Taiwan its own territory and views U.S. arms sales to Taiwan as a severe interference in its internal affairs and a violation of its sovereignty. Beijing has repeatedly threatened "forceful measures" and imposed sanctions on U.S. defense companies in response to such sales.
Arms Embargoes: Both the U.S. and the EU have long-standing arms embargoes on China (since the 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown), which prevent the sale of most military-related items to China.
Export Controls: China has its own strict export control regulations on military and dual-use items to "safeguard national security and interests". It explicitly prohibits the transfer of arms or military items to any third party without its prior consent, which underscores its control over such materials.
Sanctions and Retaliation: When the U.S. announces arms sales to Taiwan, China typically retaliates with sanctions against the U.S. defense firms involved. The idea of China actively supplying parts for weapons that would then be used against its own forces is fundamentally opposed to its national interests and stated policies.
Supply Chain Concerns: While the U.S. defense industry may have a general reliance on some Chinese-made materials or components for civilian applications or general electronics, there is a clear strategic push to reduce this dependence for critical military applications, precisely due to supply chain vulnerabilities and geopolitical tensions.
In summary, the political and legal frameworks, combined with explicit national security interests, ensure that China does not officially or intentionally contribute to the U.S. military's capacity to engage in a conflict with China.
1. China Learns From Animals to Train an AI-Driven Military --- Beijing researchers study hawks and coyotes to develop war machines that can pick off prey and chase down enemies. Chin, Josh. Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y.. 26 Jan 2026: A1.
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