Policy analysts often frame the artificial intelligence race as a sprint between Washington and Beijing, with each running on its own track. The United States is driving toward artificial general intelligence, an AI system that surpasses human brainpower and entirely transforms society. China, however, is building efficient, scalable AI capabilities and embedding them in economic and public life worldwide. Silicon Valley’s focus is on discovery, Beijing’s on diffusion.
Ultimately, these racetracks will converge. AI dominance will derive from having best-in-class technologies and entrenching them into industries, governments, and education systems across the globe. If Washington treats the contest solely as a race to hit new capability benchmarks, it could lead in invention but fall behind in influencing where and how AI is used worldwide.
To prevail in the AI race, the United States should augment its clear advantage in frontier innovation with a concerted strategy to foster global adoption of its AI stack, the set of technical layers needed to build, operate, and use AI systems, from the computing infrastructure underneath to the applications with which people interact.
This would not only give the United States a leg up on China in the defining technology of the future. If it prioritizes values, safeguards, and accountability, a U.S. plan to promote AI openness might also help stanch the backlash against U.S. technology and rebuild the country’s historic reputation as a force for rights and government responsibility. Done well, it could even secure U.S. global economic leadership and begin to restore faith that U.S. values may yet have something to offer the world.
Currently, the United States still supplies much of the world’s default AI stack: Nvidia dominates data center processing units; Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud command nearly two-thirds of global cloud infrastructure; and U.S. labs produced 40 notable AI models in 2024, compared with just 15 from China. But China is advancing quickly, especially through Huawei’s domestic chip push and Alibaba’s Qwen open-weight ecosystem. The U.S. lead may be a depreciating asset unless paired with a diffusion strategy.
Chinese competitors are also starting to catch up to the United States’ frontier AI technologies. Consider the shockwaves made by the 2025 launch of DeepSeek’s chatbot, a Chinese model that requires far less computing power than U.S. counterparts and is valued at around $52 billion. Leaks and hacks of U.S. models, including DeepSeek’s alleged “free-riding” on OpenAI and alleged espionage at Google AI, signal that the U.S. technological edge remains vulnerable.
While Beijing prepares for the racetracks to merge, investing in frontier research, Washington is not actively fostering the broad adoption of its technologies. U.S. AI giants are focused on meeting rocketing demand from corporate customers, no matter where they are located. The Commerce Department’s strategy, issued last July, is oriented toward driving wider export of AI packages, rather than seeding adoption in strategic geographies.
U.S. technology has had historic success with global adoption. Amazon Web Services, Apple, Google, Meta, and Microsoft did not just create and sell appealing products. They became part of the infrastructure that businesses and agencies have now built on for decades. Their global diffusion led to developers being trained on their platforms, procurement rules favoring their products, and ever-growing switching costs. The widespread adoption of these platforms became a self-reinforcing cycle. U.S. tech behemoths shaped global norms for coding, online search, and the integration of new products into existing systems.
As these platforms became the default, onetime market-leading competitors, such as BlackBerry phones, became museum pieces. While BlackBerry approached competitive advantage in phones as a matter of making better devices, companies such as Apple and Google had their eye on the bigger picture, and their growing market control propelled them into the ranks of the world’s largest and most profitable companies.
But there is a key difference between then and now: When U.S. tech giants achieved their ascent early this century, Chinese competitors were barely on the scene. U.S. companies had such overwhelming technological advantages that widespread adoption occurred without any coordinated national effort.
These earlier U.S. platforms also spread abroad incrementally, fueled by consumer demand. AI is proliferating in a different way: Governments are playing a more active role from the start in data governance, energy supply, and procurement, selecting the technical blueprints that will shape their economies, public services, and security capabilities. The architectural moment is unfolding now, and China is rightly treating AI choices as a matter of statecraft.
Since 2013, China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) has offered investments in ports, railways, and logistics hubs throughout Africa, Asia, Europe, and Latin America. Two years later, China wove the Digital Silk Road into the BRI, augmenting physical infrastructure with digital connectivity through telecommunications networks, cloud services, data centers, and satellites. This base offers Chinese AI companies a powerful potential end-to-end deployment engine. A country that uses Chinese-built networks, smart-city platforms, and security systems will look at Chinese AI as a natural progression.
Already, Chinese-installed infrastructure has provided entry for its AI offerings abroad. In Saudi Arabia, for instance, Huawei has used its Riyadh cloud region to support government services and Arabic-language AI applications, turning a cloud foothold into a foundation for public sector adoption. Once Chinese firms help build the networks and data systems, they are well placed to supply compatible AI tools and box out U.S. competitors. Chinese firms have also proved more willing to meet demand for goods and services that U.S. companies tend to overlook, including cheaper tools and local-language adaptation.
But China’s diffusion strategy is not invincible. Countries that first welcomed Chinese technology via the BRI and Digital Silk Road because it was cheap, fast, and bundled with financing are awakening to its downsides. A 2026 assessment by the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab of AI cooperation under the Digital Silk Road found persistent concerns over privacy, surveillance, debt, and backlash.
In Serbia, Huawei’s “Safe City” project—a surveillance system built around cameras, command centers, and facial recognition software—has been met with legal challenges, public protests, and biometric surveillance concerns, with one expert warning that full deployment in Belgrade could produce camera density commensurate with China’s surveillance state. Across Latin America, civil society groups have challenged the spread of Safe City and related initiatives on privacy and human rights grounds.
The United States does not have a BRI equivalent, but it has two formidable advantages over China: a privately built software, cloud, commerce, and social media ecosystem already embedded in billions of daily routines worldwide and AI products that are in huge demand. Currently, the top seven U.S. tech companies generate nearly half their revenue from abroad.
Still, without a more deliberate national strategy, Washington risks allowing a private sector-led process to yield an assortment of vendor relationships rather than a durable global ecosystem.
Washington has begun to grasp the stakes. The Biden administration revived industrial policy through the CHIPS and Science Act and viewed AI safety, security, and rights as essential to global competition. The Trump administration has aggressively pushed export promotion, issuing a July 2025 executive order to promote the U.S. AI stack abroad as a counterweight to China. The Commerce Department’s American AI Exports Program has invited industry-led consortia to propose full-stack packages for financing support.
But while the Trump administration sees the problem, its answer is too narrow. By itself, a sales campaign for the U.S. AI stack will not jump-start adoption fast enough to keep pace with China.
To spread its AI widely, the United States should create a Global Empowerment Network for Accountable AI, spearheaded by the White House and co-led by the Commerce and State departments. This partnership would bring together U.S. tech firms, universities, and development finance agencies. Ideally, it would begin by seeking a handful of individual country compacts in locations that are clamoring for AI acceleration and where U.S. tech is already well ensconced, including strategic partners in Southeast Asia and the Gulf.
The aim should be to help willing countries build AI capacity around U.S. systems, including allied inputs such as Taiwanese chips, while maintaining enough control to avoid being subjugated to any single vendor or the U.S. government. These contracts could cover not just procurement but training, research partnerships, and exchanges among educators and officials.
Each compact should pair cutting-edge AI offerings with accompanying incentives, such as financing for secure data centers, access to frontier models, and cybersecurity support. Terms should be set individually based on a country’s priorities, not dictated by Washington or Silicon Valley. A Kenyan pact, for example, could focus on crop forecasting and tools for small farmers. A Philippine one could combine disaster response, customs modernization, and cyber-resilience.
While China’s offer is speed and convenience, the United States can differentiate its AI proposition by ensuring transparent terms and guardrails for privacy, free expression, and local autonomy that help societies modernize without normalizing censorship or mass surveillance.
Any such program should reflect hard-won lessons of recent decades concerning development financing and U.S. global aid. Programs endure when they create real benefits for both Americans and foreign partners, and they perform best when partner countries help define the problem, shape the solution, and build the domestic institutions to sustain it. A credible proposal should therefore pair strategic U.S. interests with local ownership, transparent governance, durable financing, and measurable gains on both sides.
A U.S.-led global AI program should generate partner-country opportunity through entrepreneurship support, local hiring, public sector training, and domestic maintenance and audit functions. The United States would gain scalable exports and strategic leverage, while partners would access tools they could operate, adapt, and govern freely.
For ordinary Americans, the case for a global AI adoption strategy cannot rest on the notion that gains for tech companies will trickle down. An explicit bargain should be built into the program, with public support channeled to partnerships that create tangible value for Americans in the form of jobs and training opportunities. That could include a new technical assistance corps built for the AI era. Washington could fund U.S.-trained engineers, governance advisors, and AI-savvy recent graduates to work in joint teams with partner-country counterparts to solve implementation problems and bring lessons from their global experience back home.
Such a program would also offer the United States a way to rebuild its reputation. In the past, soft power sometimes seemed to emanate naturally from the country’s vibrant culture, openness, and can-do spirit. That halo effect is long gone. Now, confidence in Washington will have to be earned through U.S. competence, trustworthy guardrails, and peer-based partnerships. If a Kenyan teacher, a Philippine customs official, a Brazilian judge, or an Indonesian start-up founder experiences U.S. technology as an accessible way to solve problems without surrendering institutional autonomy, U.S. values will begin to gain new currency.
By demonstrating how AI can render democracies more efficient and better able to deliver, the United States can offer a counterweight to China’s authoritarian efficacy. The next administration should make global AI adoption a pillar of U.S. economic statecraft. By pairing U.S. technology with financing, training, cybersecurity, and safeguards against abuses, Washington can open markets for U.S. firms, reduce foreign reliance on Chinese infrastructure, and rebuild soft power. China has the Digital Silk Road. The United States needs an AI adoption strategy that gives countries a better bargain: world-class technology without digital dependence.
