Converting artificial intelligence into national capability: A three-layer framework for comparative strategy

Artificial intelligence is increasingly treated as a strategic technology, but innovation or regulation alone does not produce national power. This article develops a realist, state-centered framework for analyzing how states convert distributed artificial-intelligence capacity into strategic power. It argues that conversion occurs across three interdependent layers: Invention, Industrialization, and Operationalization, with governance structuring access, coordination, constraint, legitimacy, and control across them. Governance is treated as a cross-layer conversion mechanism rather than as a separate layer or as a synonym for AI regulation. Such conversion governance can enable capability conversion, but it can also delay, fragment, constrain, or fail to connect with infrastructure and operational use. Through a structured comparison of the United States and China as sovereign state-centered configurations, and the European Union as a regulatory-market configuration, the article assesses how state authority, strategic-firm capacity, regulatory power and infrastructural dependence combine differently to produce, limit or mediate national capability today.