## 1 Introduction  
Diverse IT infrastructures and digital technologies have become fundamental for military, political, and economic power in the contemporary great power rivalry. The capacity to innovate in this digital landscape, especially in artificial intelligence (AI), has become a central determinant of power and influence. Political leaders often echo the narratives of technological supremacy from the Cold War, underscoring the strategic importance of AI and associating achievements with overall power distribution and supremacy, much like nuclear weapons, missiles, and space technology were perceived during the Cold War (CW). For example, [PERSON]'s 2017 famous statement that \"the country that leads in AI will rule the world\" [1] directly aligns with the narrative developed by the U.S. at the beginning of the space age in the early 1960s, that the country that controls space will rule the world [2]. In October 2018, [PERSON] said that China must \"ensure that our country marches in the front ranks, when it comes to theoretical research in this important area of AI\" [3]. In 2019, the American Secretary of Defense, Dr. [PERSON], expressed a similar approach when referring to the competition in the field of AI as the space race... \"Whoever gets there first is going to dominate\" [4]. Speaking at the Artificial Intelligence Action Summit in Paris in February 2025, Vice-President [PERSON] said that \"the United States of America is the leader in AI, and our administration plans to keep it that way\" [5]. Nevertheless, we argue that contemporary great power tech rivalries considerably differ from previous ones because they have shifted from singular military-industrial to generative digital-innovation rivalries. Thus, they are conducted through different agents, pose different threats, and result in power transitions. We use two cartoons, one from 1962 and another from 2019, to illustrate these differences and generate the puzzle and research question from these differences. The first cartoon [6] was published by the Daily Mail in 1962, while the second [7] appeared in the Financial Times in 2019. Published in Western media, the two cartoons represent a Western perspective using the same narrative of arm wrestling to describe world politics as a definite competition between two giant superpowers. Arm wrestling is a popular exercise to demonstrate the superiority of one player over another. In an analogy to world politics, it represents a power struggle, with each side trying to outanneuver the other. In the 1962 cartoon, the leaders of the U.S. and the Soviet Union, representing their states, compete while sitting on hydrogen bombs and threatening to push the button that would launch an attack on the other side. The 2019 cartoon depicts two robotic arms, not specific leaders, whose sleeves bear the national flags, thus symbolically representing the U.S. and China as wrestling nations. Nevertheless, they do not threaten each other. It is essential to note that cartoons often depict certain perceptions of reality rather than an exact representation. These two cartoons illustrate the prominent role of technology in these two competitions, highlighting several differences. First, in the 1962 cartoon, the two superpowers compete for and directly threaten each other with military capacity and the ability to use weapons of mass destruction. In the 2019 cartoon, the struggling robotic arms indicate that digital technology is central to the competition. Still, its actual use and threat are undefined. The second issue concerns the competing agents. In the 1962 cartoon, the competition is held directly between the two leaders. Technology is at their service. Conversely, in the 2019 cartoon, the competition is between two robotic arms. The identities of the agents through which competition is held remain vague. The third issue concerns the power balance and the competitors' identity. The 1962 cartoon's competitors were the U.S. and the Soviet Union.