While Trump Haggles Over Chip Sale Percentages, the PLA Builds an Army of Autonomous Drones and Robot Dogs. Reuters Hands Washington a Reason for Fresh Sanctions.
In February 2025, Chinese defense giant Norinco unveiled the P60 autonomous combat vehicle, capable of executing combat missions at speeds up to 50 km/h. The machine's brain? DeepSeek - the crown jewel of China's tech sector. The Communist Party hailed it as the first demonstration of how Beijing is leveraging AI to close the gap with the United States in the arms race.
The vehicle itself wasn't shown - only statements and select technical specs were released. The P60 is a UGV, or unmanned ground vehicle: for context, another recently showcased tank, the VU-T10, falls into the same category (pictured).
But forget tanks for a moment. Zoom out, and the picture is broader: hundreds of patents, research papers, and military tenders reveal DeepSeek being systematically integrated into China's armed forces. Drone swarms, robot dogs for demining, autonomous target designation - these are no longer concepts but real developments within the People's Liberation Army (PLA).
In 2025 alone, DeepSeek appeared in 12 PLA military tenders - compared to just one for its main domestic rival, Alibaba's Qwen. The model's popularity among the military stems from its "algorithmic sovereignty": it reduces reliance on Western technologies and tightens control over critical digital infrastructure.
The integration of DeepSeek into the P60 combat vehicle was handled by Chinese firm Landship Information Technology. In February, they released a White Paper on DeepSeek's military applications, co-developed with Huawei Mobile Data Center. The document outlines Huawei's 2025 roadmap for embedding DeepSeek in the military domain: from semantic command understanding in March to drone-based detection of camouflaged targets by December.
Landship claims the Huawei-chip-based technology can rapidly identify targets from satellite imagery, coordinating with radars and aviation for seamless operations.
Researchers at Xi'an Technological University announced in May 2025 that their DeepSeek-powered system evaluated 10,000 combat scenarios in just 48 seconds - a task that would take a conventional military planning team 48 hours. Verifying these figures independently is challenging, but the claims align with DeepSeek's known prowess in tackling complex problems.
Beihang University - renowned for its military aviation developments - is using DeepSeek to enhance decision-making in drone swarms targeting "low, slow, small" threats (drones and light aircraft).
Back in November 2024, the PLA issued a tender for AI-equipped robot dogs to operate in packs for reconnaissance and explosive detection. Whether the tender has been fulfilled remains unclear, but China has already demonstrated armed robot dogs from manufacturer Unitree during military exercises.
In August 2025, Trump announced an unprecedented deal: Nvidia and AMD would remit 15% of revenue from sales of H20 and MI308 chips to China to the U.S. government in exchange for export licenses. Trump dismissed the H20 as "outdated" and "an old chip that China already has in another form." He also hinted that for cutting-edge Blackwell chips, he'd push for 30-50%.
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The deal's legal footing is murky - it's unclear under what authority it was struck or whether it qualifies as a tax.
Here's the rub: The PLA and affiliated entities continue using Nvidia chips, including models under U.S. export controls. They can't pinpoint exactly when these chips were imported, though.
Washington's terse official comment sums up the takeaway: America plans to "pursue a bold, inclusive strategy to disseminate U.S. AI technologies to trusted foreign countries, while preventing them from reaching adversaries."
And DeepSeek R2? It still hasn't launched.
