Can America Stay Ahead of China on AI?

SPEAKER_1 (0:01)

I'm Amy Scott, host of How We Survive, a podcast about the messy business of climate solutions. To a lot of people, geoengineering might seem like a dangerous, outlandish way to play God. But some are embracing this sci-fi inspired approach as a solution to the climate crisis.

Listen to How We Survive on your favorite podcast app.

Ravi Agrawal (0:31)

Hi, I'm Ravi Agrawal, Foreign Policy's Editor-in-Chief. This is FP Live.

There's something very strange about the debate over regulating AI. Think of any product that could be both beneficial to society or harmful if it goes wrong. A new heart drug, baby formula, or a new aircraft model, for example. For that product to get to market, it needs to go through extensive testing, approvals, and yes, regulation. We've come to think of that process as normal, a necessary hurdle.

AI has had a different trajectory. As more warnings emerge about AI's potential abilities to deceive humans or to destroy the very concept of cybersecurity, the message from the White House seems to be to self-police. In fact, that is exactly what emerged from a meeting last week between President Donald Trump and a group of top tech executives. They agreed to establish voluntary standards. And as I said, this is all very different from what we apply to other products. And at the core of that difference is a fear that if US companies aren't number one at AI, then Chinese companies will be.

So I wanted this week's show to focus on competition between the US and China on AI. Who is ahead and by how much? Who is regulating and in what way? If their systems are different, which one is better and how will that impact the rest of the world? I have a terrific guest this week to talk through all of this.

But first, some news from Latin America. Last Sunday, Flavio Bolsonaro received the most votes in the first round of Brazil's elections, sending him into a runoff against incumbent president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. Here's my read on things. If Flavio's surname sounds familiar, it should. He's the son of the previous president, the hard right Jair Bolsonaro, who is currently under house arrest for attempting a self coup to stay in power. The runoff vote is near the end of the month, and the winner will become president. I thought the economist had a great headline to summarize the race. It said, Brazil's next president will either be a vengeful nepo baby or a doddering lefty. But more substantially, as Adam Goldsmith argued in FP, neither candidate will solve Brazil's core issues of lackluster growth and entrenched corruption. Instead of lurching from right to left and back again and again, Brazil probably needs a smarter third option to make reforms that actually last.

Beyond the domestic side to this story, what stood out to me is a broader trend line. If Bolsonaro wins, it will be the eighth time a right wing candidate has won a presidential election in Latin America in the past 18 months. The others, in case you're wondering, have been Colombia, Chile, Honduras, Bolivia, Peru, Ecuador and Costa Rica. Each country has its own particular politics, of course, but it is fair to say that there is a public desire to select candidates who are tough on crime. If you zoom out still further, there's a connection back to the United States. Several of these right wing candidates have been backed by the Trump administration, which is making a war on drugs a major plank of its policy in the region. The Pentagon, for example, is conducting joint military action against cartels with countries such as Ecuador. And it's all part of the broader concept of the so-called Donro doctrine, a play on the Monroe doctrine, which implies that the United States exerts great power control over the Western Hemisphere. Brazil is really the most interesting case in this trend, not only because of its sheer size and clout, but also because right now it is the biggest source of soybean imports to China, posing a direct challenge to US farmers. We're already seeing how countries react to pressure from the White House in different ways. Clearly, in some capitals in South and North America, Trump's war on drugs is popular despite fears over what US involvement means for their sovereignty. But then you have a country like Canada, which has gone the other direction. Pressure from the United States to kowtow on trade or territorial sovereignty propelled Mark Carney to victory in an election last year that he seemed to have no chance of winning. Carney wrote the anti-Trump vote, and now he seems to be leading a movement to de-risk from America. Mexico has a more moderate approach, by the way. The left-leaning Claudia Scheinbaum has been remarkably diplomatic with the Trump administration. But coming back to where we started, if Brazilians actually elect Bolsonaro as their next president, it could be interpreted as a signal from South America, from its biggest economy, that the allure of Trumpism isn't over just yet.