To Understand China's AI Strategy, Look to China's Trade Strategy

International Trade attorney Patrick Childress wrote a column for The Washington Post about China's strategy for artificial intelligence (AI) market dominance. Patrick explains that Beijing's approach to AI is one focused on making "good enough" products at scale and then exporting them at low prices to consumers around the world, rather than engaging in the race to make the most technologically advanced products that could quickly become obsolete. As evidence, the article recaps how China used this playbook to become the dominant player in the electric vehicle (EV) industry: locking down EV upstream inputs to aggregate raw materials, layering subsidies and public procurement defenses to decrease production costs, and shipping affordable EV cars to cost-conscious buyers. Given the success of this strategy – China now produces nearly 75 percent of the world's EVs – expect it to follow a similar pattern for AI by controlling inputs through building compute capacity and hoarding training data, promoting domestic production through subsidies and marketing products that may not represent frontier models but still function well for day-to-day tasks – importantly at cheaper prices than competitors like the U.S. and European Union. As Patrick concludes, China's trade strategy demonstrates that winning the AI market does not entail building the best AI, just the AI that people will use.

READ: To Understand China's AI Strategy, Look to China's Trade Strategy (Subscription required)