These children weren’t just playing with a tool; they were thinking with it. Fluently. Fearlessly. And joyfully.

Meanwhile, in many American classrooms, AI is either absent or actively banned.

Weipeng Yang, principal investigator of early childhood learning sciences at the Education University of Hong Kong, recently shared this scene that he witnessed in mainland China. The gulf between how China is educating its future labor force and how we are doing is a threat that should stop American policymakers in their tracks.

China has made AI education a national priority, and it begins in kindergarten. The goal is at least as strategic as it is educational: create a generation hardwired for 21st-century dominance. By introducing AI when the brain is most plastic, it is engineering a long-term competitive advantage.

It’s not accidental. It’s a doctrine.

In contrast, the United States is, at best, ambivalent — and at worst, obstructive. Across the U.S., school districts frequently block access to AI tools. Teachers are warned that using AI might constitute cheating. While policymakers are arguing about ethics, American students fall behind.

The U.S. spends many hundreds of billions each year on AI infrastructure. However, it has yet to secure the most essential asset of all: the cognitive readiness of its future workforce.

We are building satellites and autonomous defense platforms, yet raising children who are being told not to touch the interface that powers them. While we argue about risks, our strategic rivals are growing millions of children who treat AI as naturally as using a pencil.

This isn’t hypothetical. It’s happening in China now — in classrooms like the one Yang observed. And each day we delay, the advantage deepens.

The neuroscience is clear: early exposure has an outsize impact. When children interact with systems such as AI at age four, they’re not just learning tools; they’re shaping neural architecture.

Skills developed during these formative years endure, forming cognitive reflexes that give them lifelong fluency. By comparison, introducing AI in high school or later is like trying to teach fluency in Mandarin at 18, while the competition has spoken it since birth.

“You won’t be replaced by AI; you’ll be replaced by someone who knows how to use it.” This phrase is often tossed around as a slogan. It should be etched into the walls of every education policy room in the country. Our economic and military future depends not just on developing cutting-edge AI, but on cultivating a population capable of using it and leading with it.

First, reframe the narrative. AI isn’t a threat to childhood. With the right tools and boundaries, it becomes a sandbox for creativity and critical thinking.

Second, introduce AI literacy in kindergarten. Start simple: decomposition, pattern recognition, cause and effect. Just as we teach letters and numbers, we must teach code and computation.

Third, equip teachers and classrooms. Allocate funding to train educators and implement safe, age-appropriate AI platforms across all public schools.

Fourth, make it national policy for educators in the West. We don’t leave national defense up to local school boards. We shouldn’t do so with AI readiness either.

What Yang saw wasn’t just a class project; it was a peek into what the West’s chief rival is doing to cultivate the workforce of the future.   As oil once powered empires, artificial intelligence will fuel the superpowers of tomorrow. We must decide now whether our children will participate in that future — or be governed with values that allow scant room for liberty, pluralism, or conscience.

Mitzi Perdue is co-founder of Mental Help Global, a war correspondent writing from and about Ukraine, and a member of the education and research group of the American Society for AI.