This weekend, Shanghai was host to China’s annual “World Artificial Intelligence Conference,” a government-organized AI showcase packed with tech giants from both China and the U.S. including Huawei, Tesla, and Amazon.
The theme was “Global Solidarity in the AI Era,” and Chinese Premier Li Qiang opened the conference with a sweeping proposal: the establishment of a global AI cooperation organization, potentially headquartered in Shanghai. The Chinese foreign ministry has since released an action plan calling for international collaboration in AI through open-source communities and joint research.
While China’s AI messaging is starting to sound like “AI for all,” the United States is still split on its own battle tactic. The Trump administration has welded an isolationist trade approach globally, and particularly with China when it comes to AI and technology. But with recent policy changes, that hardline has seemed to soften as Washington is split between two camps on how to approach the battle for AI dominance with China: that is, whether to continue with a heavily protectionist approach or join China’s calls for solidarity.
A tense year in AI geopolitics
Beijing’s invitation to rally behind a Chinese vision of AI cooperation landed in the middle of a tense year in AI geopolitics.
The United States has been the global leader in AI development, but domestic confidence in America’s competitive edge was shaken earlier this year. Following the meteoric success of Chinese AI company Deepseek’s low-cost yet high-performance model, the Trump administration took a hard line on advanced technology exports to China.
The administration attempted to slam the brakes on Beijing’s hardware access by further tightening existing export controls on advanced Nvidia chips to China, in an effort to curb the country’s rapid innovation, starve its AI ecosystem, and preserve U.S. dominance.
But the ban hasn’t gone exactly to plan.
A Financial Times report from last week revealed that roughly $1 billion worth of Nvidia’s banned advanced B200 chips had been smuggled into China in the three months since the export controls went into effect.
The administration changed course on the ban and quietly retreated from its hard-line stance earlier this month, when Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang announced that the company would resume selling its older H20 chips legally to China.
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