arms race

American  

noun

1. competition between countries to achieve superiority in quantity and quality of military arms.

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arms race British  

noun

1. the continuing competitive attempt by two or more nations each to have available to it more and more powerful weapons than the other(s)

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Etymology

Origin of arms race

First recorded in 1935–40

Example Sentences

See Examples For:

arms race

None of us asked to be in this AI arms race.

From Salon ● Sep. 16, 2026

It says out-of-control AI will lead to the apocalypse, with the dire warning coming from an Anthropic researcher, Jacob Coxon, who quit the company fearing the tech arms race is moving too quickly.

From BBC ● Sep. 9, 2026

Noah Brier gets us up to speed on the state of artificial intelligence right now; from the A.I. arms race with China to the probability that we are all doomed.

From Slate ● Aug. 26, 2026

Until this year, Anthropic was in clear second place to OpenAI, which burst onto the scene with ChatGPT in November 2022, transforming the tech industry and triggering an AI arms race.

From Barron's ● Aug. 26, 2026

How would we explain the global arms race to a dispassionate extraterrestrial observer?

From "Cosmos" by Carl Sagan