China vs USA: Who Will Win the AI Race?
episodePreviously titled “China Vs USA: Who Will Win the AI Race?” — renamed by the publisher on Aug 4, 2026
Transcript
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What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Thanks for listening to The Rest Is Politics. To support the podcast, listen without the adverts and get early access to episodes and live show tickets, go to therestispolitics.com. That's therestispolitics.com. Hi, Rory here. This week, Matt Clifford and I are back with another episode in our AI series. We're going to ask in this episode, who's really winning the AI race? Is it the United States? Is it China? Is the UK even in the running? We also explore what technological rivalry could mean for global politics in the years ahead. We're joined by Tino Quella, President of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, someone right at the heart of how governments are trying to grapple with fast-moving technology and global power shifts.
Tino's a former justice on the California Supreme Court, one of the most respected voices on international cooperation, and he's really well-placed to talk about how AI is reshaping the world. Here's a taster. If you like what you hear, you can listen to the full episode by signing up at therestispolitics.com. If I look at the world between 1950 and 2023, one of the most dramatic and important changes is life expectancy went from 46 years to 73 years. Literacy has gone from like less, like 55% to closer to 80%. Infant mortality has gone down. This is all a function to my mind of science and international cooperation.
Who are the key players in the AI race between China and the USA?
And right now, those kinds of questions are channeled into What does this technology do? How does it work? How can people benefit from it? So my point is simply like, those are hard questions. How do you get India on board, Germany, Japan, South Korea, the US, Mexico, all these disparate countries to figure out how to use the technology smartly, but at the same time deal with the risks? And my point is simply that all the tumult in the world right now, whether domestic or global, like the invasion of Ukraine, is taking up a lot of oxygen and making it a little harder to focus on these questions. I think you can... One thing I'm learning as we do this podcast series is my job is to sort of be the anti-Rory.
So let me give a very different framing, which I'm not sure I fully believe, but I'm going to try. I think if we all try and channel our inner Xi Jinping, I think you could tell a story that we really see over the last two years, extraordinary continuity.
How is AI reshaping global politics and international cooperation?
You know, like the idea that there's been this like sea change in US policy on AI, I don't think would register in Beijing. I think that at least people around Xi would say something like, you know, the US looks at the inevitable rise of China and it says, we need to find some way to decouple the economic growth of this much larger country, that if it gets even close to our level of prosperity on a GDP per capita basis, we'll dwarf our GDP. We have to decouple that GDP from real-world power. What the successive US administrations of both stripes have done very successfully is say, AI is one of the core ways that we can achieve this historically unprecedented hoarding of power despite demographic destiny.
Therefore, we're going to have export controls. You will not be allowed to build powerful AI, and we will accelerate our companies, and we will make sure that we win. What do you think? I think there's a lot to that. And actually, I'm not sure you're the anti-Rory. You're the kind of like Rory compliment. That's a nicer way of saying it. If I reconcile the two perspectives for you, I think this is the foundation that does peace.
What challenges do governments face in regulating AI technology?
Right. But here's what I mean by that. You're right that at a high level of generality, at the end of the day, Does the U.S. want to be the best at frontier AI? Absolutely. That has not changed from Biden to Trump. And that highlights that even with all these partisan changes and changes in style and leadership, there's like a geopolitical logic at work here. I will say just briefly on that, having negotiated with both administrations on this topic, I would say the similarities are more striking than the differences. Okay. That I want to explore even more.
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Chapters
5 chapters
1
What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
0:00–1:22
2
Who are the key players in the AI race between China and the USA?
1:22–2:15
3
How is AI reshaping global politics and international cooperation?
2:15–3:21
4
What challenges do governments face in regulating AI technology?
3:21–13:06
5
How do export controls impact the development of AI in China?
13:06–16:35
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