TAKEAWAY: Pick a side

Reuters is reporting that the US is preparing to tell its partners they will be excluded from any American AI initiatives if they also sign up to cooperate with China. This comes not long after Beijing announced a cooperation organization drawing in member states particularly from the Global South.

The move to force countries to pick a side would be something of a gamble for the US, and the risk is that it inadvertently sends potential partners China’s way. Nobody wants to be limited to the use of just one set of technology—there are advantages that the models of both sides possess, and an open market provides an environment in which a user can choose what is best for their needs, and therefore encourages more healthy competition. China is not known to have made any such ultimatum to potential partners.

The US may be ahead in terms of the highest levels of tech capabilities, but one direction for the future may be be downloadable LLMs—meaning they can be used offline—in which Chinese players such as Alibaba’s Qwen, DeepSeek, GLM and Moonshot AI’s Kimi are the current leaders. Many of these are also open-weight, which means the model can be modified by developers for their own use—although they stop short of sharing the full data which would allow them to be reverse engineered. These advantages may be particularly attractive to the Global South, where resources can be more limited but there is still a huge demand for AI software.