AI Geopolitics 2025: Comparing America’s Action Plan vs. China’s Action Plan

July has been a busy month for AI. Both the United States and China released their strategy action plans. 
Below is a comparative analysis of China’s 2025 Global AI Governance Action Plan (announced in Shanghai) and the 2025 America’s AI Action Plan (released in July by the White House), focused on how each superpower is defining the rules, priorities, and ​values for AI governance—and what this reveals about the emerging digital world order.

​Two Visions, One Technology: A Strategic Showdown in AI Governance








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​Strategic Takeaways
1. AI as Geopolitical Infrastructure vs. AI as Economic Engine

• China sees AI as an infrastructure-led global development paradigm, deeply tied to compute power, data control, and hardware capacity—an extension of its Belt and Road-style diplomacy.
• The U.S. sees AI primarily as an economic and national security driver, rooted in innovation ecosystems and supported by trusted data, compute, and values alliances.

2. Sovereignty vs. Openness

• China’s plan reasserts national sovereignty as the organizing principle of AI governance, appealing to states wary of U.S. digital dominance.
• America’s plan frames openness and interoperability as core tenets, but struggles to reconcile this with its own tightening of export controls and compute geopolitics.

3. UN-Led Globalism vs. Democratic Alliances

• China aims to shape new UN-based mechanisms for AI governance to sidestep the West’s G7/OECD-centric frameworks.
• The U.S. leans into its coalition of democracies, promoting “trusted” governance while resisting broader UN control.

4. Soft Power vs. Rule-Based Order

• China is using AI diplomacy (capacity building, infrastructure, open-source ecosystems) as a soft power tool—especially toward the Global South.
• The U.S. is more focused on rule-setting, ensuring that AI advances align with liberal norms, even if this risks estranging non-aligned countries.

 
The Bigger Picture: A Fracturing Digital Future
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The contrast couldn’t be starker:

• China offers AI as a sovereign development tool, tightly coupled with infrastructure diplomacy, national control, and UN legitimacy.
• The U.S. promotes AI as a liberal innovation domain, grounded in individual rights, private enterprise, and democratic alliances.

This is more than a policy split—it's a confrontation between two rival digital world orders: one rooted in state sovereignty, the other driven by open innovation.
Whether the world moves toward a bipolar AI governance structure or finds some space for hybrid models—especially in the Global South—will shape the next decade of geopolitics and global tech governance.