China’s soft power play in the global AI arms race

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**Meghan McCarty Carino** (0:31)
Chinese AI is really having a moment. From American Public Media, this is Marketplace Tech. I'm Meghan McCarty Carino.
In the last month, several new models from Chinese AI companies have narrowed the gap with top US tech and at a lower cost. One was even used to defend against an unintended hack from open AI models that went rogue during testing. Here with more is Adam Segal at the Council on Foreign Relations. He says Chinese models are open. They publish details about their software and weights.

**Adam Segal** (1:15)
It means that you can download them yourselves, you can run them on a local system, and you can tailor them to your own needs. And the Chinese have really embraced this as a way of saying that they are going to promote these models globally and that they're going to be much more accessible for developing economies and just cheaper to use.

**Meghan McCarty Carino** (1:38)
How much has the Chinese Communist Party actually influenced this trajectory? I think we know China takes a much more hands-on approach to its tech sector. But how much does this kind of fit into a broader strategy by the CCP?

**Adam Segal** (1:54)
I think it fits into the strategy by happenstance. I don't think the Communist Party knew a lot about the differences between open weight and proprietary models when all of this began. I think Chinese companies facing severe competition from the anthropic and open AI and US firms that had adopted this proprietary model had adopted open weight as their own way to kind of make space in the market. So it was really a kind of competitive decision.
And then the party really embraced that idea and pushed it forward.

**Meghan McCarty Carino** (2:28)
I think when we look at a lot of Chinese industries that become very competitive, there's often this issue of government subsidy, the electric vehicle industry, the solar industry. Is that the case here?

**Adam Segal** (2:42)
No, we don't really see a lot of subsidies. There's probably some support on the chip side, since we know getting access to the most powerful chips is difficult for China because they've been cut off from the US. There's been some suggestion that there's been some subsidies there, but it's not what we saw, for example, around Huawei, the telecommunications company, or some of the other is where we saw some significant state support.

**Meghan McCarty Carino** (3:10)
We'll be right back.

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**Meghan McCarty Carino** (4:42)
You're listening to Marketplace Tech. I'm Meghan McCarty Carino. We're back with Adam Segal at the Council on Foreign Relations.
So how has this open weight approach been working for Chinese models?

**Adam Segal** (4:55)
So far, pretty good.
As we said at the top, that they have been as competitive or very close to competitive, with the cutting-edge frontier models in the United States, you see widespread usage of them even inside the United States. We've seen some prominent US companies, Microsoft and others talking about how they are using open weight models from China for specific purposes. I think the messaging to the developing and emerging economies has been very effective. You see US companies now and US government saying, wow, we need to have our own open weight models as well.