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Paris AI Summit divergence
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4/5
High(4)High quality. Established institution or organization with editorial oversight and accountability.
Rating inherited from publication venue: Atlantic Council
Relevant to AI governance researchers tracking how great-power competition shapes international AI policy frameworks and safety-adjacent standards-setting efforts.
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Importance: 52/100blog postanalysis
Summary
An Atlantic Council analysis comparing the US 'Winning the AI Race' AI Action Plan and China's 'Global AI Governance Action Plan,' both released in late July 2025. The piece examines how the two superpowers are pursuing divergent visions of AI leadership—the US focused on domestic innovation and technology exports, China on reshaping international governance norms toward state-centric control. Multiple experts address implications for global AI governance, standards-setting, and geopolitical competition.
Key Points
- •The US plan has three pillars: accelerating AI innovation, building domestic AI infrastructure, and international diplomacy around exports and standards.
- •China's plan focuses narrowly on international governance and multilateral cooperation, but aims to replace the current multistakeholder order with state-centric alternatives.
- •The near-simultaneous release of both plans signals deliberate strategic signaling to a global audience about competing AI leadership models.
- •Both plans reflect a broader geopolitical contest over who sets global AI rules, standards, and norms rather than purely technical competition.
- •Countries beyond the US and China are also shaping the AI age, meaning neither plan will determine global AI governance unilaterally.
Cited by 1 page
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Reading between the lines of the dueling US and Chinese AI action plans - Atlantic Council
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Action speaks louder than words—but words are a good place to start. On July 23, the Trump administration released ” Winning the AI Race: America’s AI Action Plan. ” Three days later, China unveiled its “ Global AI Governance Action Plan. ” Both superpowers are in a contest to acquire the best technology and establish the rules of the road for artificial intelligence (AI), and their decisions will have a major impact on the global AI ecosystem. To figure out what these dueling plans mean for both countries and the wider world, we reached out to our top tech minds for their take on six burning questions.
1. The US and Chinese plans are both focused on “AI action,” but are they similar?
Though differing in scope and intent, the AI action plans released by the United States and China targeted the same global audience and provided revealing indicators of how each country aims to define global leadership amid rapid technological change.
The US AI Action Plan is broad in scope, ranging from domestic industrial capacity to promoting US technology abroad. Preceded by President Donald Trump’s visit to Pittsburgh where he touted investments in AI infrastructure, the rollout of the action plan included primarily US industry leaders and policymakers. The plan has three pillars, including accelerating AI innovation, building AI infrastructure in the United States, and international diplomacy focused on US exports, standards, and security.
China’s plan, announced at the World AI Conference in Shanghai, is more narrowly focused on international governance, standards, and norms. Speaking to an international conference on July 26 in Shanghai, Chinese Premier Li Qiang announced thirteen elements of China’s approach to “multilateral and bilateral cooperation.” While the language espouses collaboration, China’s global approach is to ultimately replace the current rules-based, multistakeholder international order with an alternative centered on state control, increasingly through technology.
The proximity of the announcements is no coincidence. But the United States and China are far from the only countries shaping the age of AI.
— Graham Brookie is the Atlantic Council’s vice president for technology programs and strategy.
2. How should we expect each plan to materialize around the world?
China and the United States are advancing fundamentally different visions of AI’s role in the world. For China, AI is geopolitical infrastructure—centralized, sovereign, and aligned with its Belt and Road–style diplomacy. It emphasizes sovereign compute pow
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