In recent years, politicians and technology leaders have increasingly compared the modern race to create superintelligent artificial intelligence with the space race of the twentieth century. US President Donald Trump said directly that today’s technological and industrial race for primacy in AI is a “new space race.” But that comparison not only simplifies history; it also misleads us about the nature of both races.
The space race was a contest between two superpowers in which victory was measured by concrete, irreversible, and symbolically powerful achievements: the first satellite, the first man in space, the first man on the Moon. It was a race with a finish line. Once Neil Armstrong stepped onto the lunar surface, it was clear who had won. The race for superintelligence, by contrast, has no obvious outcome. Michael Kratsios, director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, admitted this plainly: unlike the lunar program, the AI race has no obvious finish. Researchers at ASPI note that “unlike the space race, which had clear milestones and endpoints, AI development is continuous, diffuse, and accelerating. There is no definite finish line or single achievement that would signal victory.”
Moreover, the space race was a state project. The USSR and the United States poured enormous budgetary resources into it for the sake of national prestige. The AI race today is driven largely by the private sector—companies such as OpenAI, Google, Microsoft, and others. That changes the very logic of the competition: instead of national prestige, what is at stake is market capitalization, monopoly rent, and control over data infrastructure. As Inga Unicane argues in “Against the New Space Race,” using the rhetoric of a space race in AI debates “tends to put narrow and short-term economic interests above broader and longer-term public needs.”
There is also a more fundamental difference. The space race produced technologies that changed everyday life—satellite communications, GPS, meteorology, materials science. The race for superintelligence calls into question the very existence of humanity, if one believes its most radical supporters. Businessmen such as Elon Musk and Sam Altman speak openly about creating “artificial superintelligence that will solve all the world’s most pressing problems.” But it is precisely this existential stake that makes the space-race analogy dangerous: it creates the illusion that we are dealing with a controlled competition, when in fact we may be dealing with an irreversible and unpredictable process.
Finally, the space race was limited by physics and engineering. Superintelligence is a problem at the intersection of computational complexity, philosophy of mind, and control theory. To compare it with launching a rocket is to confuse an engineering task with a civilizational challenge. The AI race is more important than the space race not because it is more spectacular, but because its consequences may prove far deeper—and far less predictable.
Bibliography
- Unicane I. Against the New Space Race: Global AI Competition and Cooperation for People // AI & Society. 2022. DOI: 10.1007/s00146-022-01423-0.
- ASPI. Collaboration, Not Competition, Should Shape AI Governance. 2025.
- The National Interest. Beyond the Space Race: Collaboration and Competition in the Future of AI Governance. 2025.