Kai-Fu Lee, a prominent investor and entrepreneur based in Beijing, has been talking up China's artificial intelligence potential for a while. Now he's got a message for the United States. The real threat to American preeminence in AI isn't China's rise, he says--it's the US government's complacency. Lee is well placed to understand the issue, even if he isn't altogether unbiased. He worked on machine learning at Carnegie Mellon University during the 1980s, led Microsoft's research lab in China in the 1990s, and then spearheaded Google's venture into China in the 2000s.