April 25, 2025

Shaping the World’s AI Future: How the U.S. and China Compete to Promote Their Digital Visions

By: Keegan McBride

On April 8, numerous committees within the United States House of Representatives held hearings on AI, examining China’s growing capabilities, the release of DeepSeek’s R1 reasoning model, and potential implications for U.S. security and economic interests. These conversations attempted to untangle what is more important for U.S. strategic interests: building the most advanced and capable AI technology, potentially at the cost of widespread global adoption, or following China’s approach by focusing on building a new global technology ecosystem where potentially less capable models could be adopted and deployed rapidly at scale.

Recent evidence suggests it may be beneficial for the United States to pursue the latter strategy. Smaller, more resource-efficient, and localizable models are gaining significant traction globally, potentially rivalling the impact of compute-intensive frontier systems in user adoption metrics. This is exemplified by the recent releases of models from Chinese firms like DeepSeek and Alibaba; smaller in size and, therefore, more efficient to run. They have quickly achieved high rates of international adoption despite, or perhaps because of, their relatively modest size.

As the United States navigates evolving global AI competition, balancing these elements will be crucial in determining whose AI systems — and by extension, whose approaches, values, and standards — shape the global technological landscape for decades to come.

Although dozens of countries participate in AI development at various stages, only a few countries, notably the United States and China, are able to scale and produce the most compute, data, and talent-intensive AI models due to the immense amount of resources required. This gap may only widen as these two countries continue to pour investment into frontier model development, AI applications, computing infrastructure, and energy systems. Therefore, the AI ambitions of most countries will be interlinked and dependent on developments in the United States or China.

Due to this dynamic, AI competition between the United States and China is often framed in terms of their state-of-the-art AI capabilities. However, this view is misleading and overlooks critical dimensions of AI leadership. Different approaches, such as promoting reliable and user-friendly AI systems in international markets, developing practical business or government AI applications, and creating AI that functions effectively across varied contexts, offer strategic advantages that often go unnoticed in policy debates on international AI competition.

Read the full article on Just Security.

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