arms race

plural arms races

1. A competition for military supremacy between two powers, especially for the most weapons and the best military technology.

   1 more example

   Mr. Xi has made his intentions clear. He aims to achieve a “national rejuvenation” that would include displacing the United States as the dominant rule-setter in the region, controlling access to the South China Sea, and bringing Taiwan — a self-governing island that China sees as lost territory — under Beijing’s control. In response, many of China’s neighbors — and the United States — are turning to hard power, accelerating the most significant arms race in Asia since World War II.

   2023 March 25, Damien Cave, “An Anxious Asia Arms for a War It Hopes to Prevent”, in The New York Times, →ISSN, →OCLC, archived from the original on 25 Mar 2023

2. figurativelyAny similar competition that involves competing developments.

   The cost of parasitism has provoked an evolutionary arms race between parasite and host, in which hosts evolve defences to avoid becoming victimized and parasites counterattack by evolving strategies to outwit their hosts.

   2006, R.M. Kilner, “The evolution of egg colour and patterning in birds”, in Biological Reviews, volume 81, page 389, column 1

   1 more example

   ChatGPT's sudden popularity has triggered an arms race among the world's leading tech companies and start-ups that are rushing to obtain the H100, which Huang describes as “the world's first computer [chip]^([sic]) designed for generative AI”—artificial intelligence systems that can quickly create humanlike text, images and content.

   2023 May 28, Tim Bradshaw, Richard Waters, “Nvidia reaps rewards from early lead in AI chipmaking”, in FT Weekend, London: The Financial Times Ltd., →ISSN, →OCLC, page 14