The US-China AI Arms Race and Badenoch vs. Rory’s Centrism

**Rory Stewart** (0:01)
Three months ago, the defining story in artificial intelligence was the race between China and the US, with China seeming to be a long way behind. And yet today, China is unveiling AI systems that are strikingly close to the US frontier, while Xi Jinping launches a new international AI organization and invites the developing world to join it. So what exactly are we looking at? Is China genuinely catching America technologically?
Or is it becoming extraordinarily good at taking American breakthroughs, building on them, and making them cheaper, open, and more accessible? And is this summit really about artificial intelligence at all? Or is it something much bigger about soft as well as hard power? A Belt and Road Initiative for AI, an attempt to make Chinese technology, Chinese standards, Chinese institutions, the default digital infrastructure for the global south. Because if that's right, then the real competition both in AI and in geopolitics may no longer be over who builds the single smartest model. It may be over who shapes the technological order that the rest of the world ends up living in.
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**Rory Stewart** (4:32)
Welcome to The Rest Is Politics Question Time with me, Rory Stewart.

**Alastair Campbell** (4:35)
And me, Alastair Campbell. So Rory, China and AI. Daniel, what does China's new AI organization reveal about its ambitions in artificial intelligence and its rivalry with the United States, which is kind of what you addressed in the introduction. First of all, you'll help me on how we pronounce this. Waco, Wacko, World Artificial Intelligence Cooperation Organization.

**Rory Stewart** (5:00)
Exactly. So two big bits of news. And of course, the Chinese have very cleverly coincided the two things together. So first big bit of news, the launch of something called Kimi K3, which is a new Chinese frontier large language model. If you were to look at it on your phone, it essentially looks a bit like Chachi BT or DeepSeek or Gemini.