By Doug Kelly:
When President Trump meets Chinese President Xi Jinping in September, artificial intelligence (AI) should be near the top of the agenda. China isn’t just racing America to build better AI tools. It is racing to dominate the global AI ecosystem, including the infrastructure, rules, adoption, and partnerships that will determine how AI is used around the world.
That’s the larger competition America needs to win. Having the best technology won’t be enough if China succeeds in getting more countries and businesses to adopt its technology, embrace its standards, and join an AI governance model built around Beijing’s rules and values. America needs to compete with the same urgency.
To win, China is deploying a multi-pronged strategy that starts at home and then spreads abroad. For example, its companies are strengthening their competitiveness by integrating AI into everyday commerce and their factories, deploying nine industrial robots for every one deployed in the United States in 2024. To overcome America’s compute advantage, China will nearly double its data-center capacity in five years, and a newly released Chinese AI model performed comparably to American competitors at a fraction of the cost.
Globally, Beijing’s leaders are accelerating efforts to be recognized as the global leader in AI governance, allowing them to export and embed authoritarian values into the globe’s digital ecosystem. Just last month, China brought together 29 countries, including Russia, Cuba, and Venezuela, to form the World AI Cooperation Organization.
But as China executes, America’s AI leadership efforts face a thicket of obstacles: thousands of proposed state-level restrictions on AI, more than 200 local data center moratoriums, and growing waves of populist opposition – flamed in part, as the New York Times reported, by Chinese and Russian propaganda – that threaten to stall our momentum in building the necessary AI infrastructure.
Winning this race matters. The victor will have an outsized role in setting the standards that govern how technology is used around the world. China understands that. America must understand it, too, and act before it’s too late.
A Chinese-run AI ecosystem would expose citizens around the world to a web engineered for censorship, surveillance, and state control, stripped of the freedoms and values that are embedded into American technology. AEPs’ issue brief found that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is using AI to extend its influence into the global infrastructure and shape technology governance around authoritarian principles. An evaluation of both U.S. and Chinese AI models revealed a stark contrast between China’s censorship-driven AI systems and America’s transparent, values-driven models that are advanced by private companies without government interference.
If America wants to preserve its global technological leadership, U.S. policymakers at all levels must act now.
- This starts with Congress codifying and funding the American AI Action Plan. That means stopping the disjointed patchwork of conflicting state AI laws from becoming a barrier to innovation. China is powering ahead with a national strategy to beat the United States in AI. We won’t stand a chance if we allow 50 different regulatory approaches to undermine the innovation that has made America the world’s technological leader.
- Next, America must build the AI infrastructure necessary to win. Without data centers and an upgraded energy grid, we cannot compete. To maintain our edge, policymakers at every level must prioritize grid modernization, including onshoring turbine and transformer production, securing the grid, streamlining permitting, and expanding transmission capacity.
- Finally, the United States must win over the world, especially the Global South, when it comes to the benefits of American-made AI. That means using public-private partnerships, offering infrastructure assistance, and discounted democratic AI platforms instead of ceding that ground to Beijing. America should give developing nations a real alternative to dependence on Chinese technology and the political influence that comes with it.
The bottom line: Plenty of pundits, diplomats, and politicians will discuss the geopolitical and trade implications of the upcoming meeting between Presidents Trump and Xi.
But much of their analysis will likely leave out one of the most consequential questions facing the digital age: How to ensure that America wins the race for global leadership. At stake is our national security, economic competitiveness, and the advancement of Western values. Washington and state capitols across the country must remain focused on our larger strategic priorities. Otherwise, we will hand China an edge we might not be able to regain.