Hundreds of firms show how their products could be used by the police and armed forces, including in the Taiwan Strait. — SCMP
Chinese defence firms showcased AI’s potential to improve combat decisions at an annual military expo in the capital last week, giving a glimpse of what could be available to the armed forces.
Vendors at the China (Beijing) Military Intelligent Technology Expo also showed how artificial intelligence could be applied to daily training, intelligence gathering, and even physical training for soldiers.
Among them was Beijing-based start-up EverReach AI, which presented an AI-assisted military training model with a flight map of an area near the Taiwan Strait as a “product case”. It appeared to show how the technology could be used to refine drills around Taiwan.
A sales representative did not confirm whether the product was used in the strait, saying only that the company had been supplying the military “for years” and that the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) was already using the system for “daily flight training”.
According to sales staff, the system learned from each flight training session, including weather conditions and pilot habits, to suggest actions.
EverReach AI also offered an “intelligent assistant” for military commanders.
Both the intelligent assistant and the training model were based on a large language model (LLM) developed by the company using other open-source models.
The technology could “reduce the processing pressure and analysis errors caused by large amounts of data, and provide strong support for real-time decision-making by commanders”, according to the company.
The company’s website featured another “product case” application, with a map of exercises in another part of the strait, but no further details were provided.
In an online article in February, EverReach AI said it had improved its product performance by using an open-source LLM by Chinese firm DeepSeek.
Beijing sees Taiwan as part of China and to be reunited by force if necessary. Most countries, including the United States, do not recognise Taiwan as an independent state, but Washington opposes any attempt to take the self-governed island by force and has pledged to supply it with weapons.
The expo, which ended on Saturday, was hosted by the semi-official Chinese Institute of Command and Control and attracted more than 500 companies from the state-owned and private sectors.
The firms were looking to sell to the military, police and defence industry, and the event was open to the public but not to foreigners.
Military officers attended the expo but in plain clothes.
State news agency Xinhua described the expo as a “national benchmark platform for military intelligent technology innovation, achievement display and application matching”.
Another AI company showcasing its military decision-making LLM was Utenet, based in the city of Xiamen just across the strait from Taiwan.
The firm said that one of its offerings could “serve more than 70 military application scenarios, including combat command, uncrewed system cluster coordination, and strategy simulation”.
It also had a combat simulation system that could be “a key support for seizing the initiative on future battlefields and winning modern wars”.
An unnamed defence academic institution has used the system in strategic simulations to “assist military commanders in intelligent strategic competition training, thereby enhancing their strategic decision-making skills”, according to the company’s website.
Utenet said that another of its products used AI to collect foreign defence intelligence, automatically analysing articles from US defence magazines.
Beijing-based GoLaxy, which has ties to the Institute of Computing Technology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, demonstrated a similar system that it claimed could monitor “massive amounts of data in global cyberspace”.
At the expo, GoLaxy showed how the system automatically collected and analysed social media discussions about the India-Pakistan conflict earlier this month.
According to its website, users of the system have included the Ministry of Public Security and anticorruption watchdog, the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection.
China sees AI as one of the main front lines in its fierce competition with the US and, although there are few details about its military applications, state broadcaster CCTV reported earlier this month that the Chinese navy had used AI for the first time in a warship degaussing exercise.
The technology has also been applied to non-combat areas of the military, with DeepSeek’s open-source LLM adopted at the PLA’s affiliated hospitals.
The applications follow directives from President Xi Jinping, who told PLA representatives in March that the military should “innovate in the construction and application of combat effectiveness” and respond swiftly to “advanced technology”.
While he did not name these technologies, Xi, who heads the Central Military Commission, had said a year earlier that space deployments, cybersecurity defences, and AI applications were “emerging areas” for the PLA to improve upon. – South China Morning Post
