Opinion: US-China AI rivalry needn't rule out real cooperation

[Aaron_67]

A South China Morning Post opinion piece argues that despite fierce competition between the US and China on AI, the rivalry doesn't have to preclude meaningful cooperation on shared global concerns. The piece points to China's World AI Cooperation Organization, which aims to help developing countries bridge the AI divide, and the US's Pax Silica initiative focused on AI, technology and supply chain security, noting the two frameworks overlap in some areas without primarily trying to solve identical problems

The author warns that treating geopolitical rivalry as sufficient to explain literally everything both countries do around AI creates a genuinely real analytical problem, since it risks pushing other countries into forced binary choices between American and Chinese frameworks. The piece cites reports that the US is preparing to warn countries that participation in initiatives deemed incompatible with the American approach could lead to exclusion from certain benefits or partnerships, which the author argues would be counterproductive for genuinely effective global AI governance overall

The piece explicitly argues that AI itself won't simply wait for geopolitical rivalries to naturally subside before causing real global consequences either way. Curious what people think, is meaningful cooperation between rival AI powers actually realistic, or does competitive pressure inevitably override it regardless of stated intentions

SCMP: US-China AI rivalry does not rule out cooperationua.news

[DrewMcIntyre_OG]

Smaller countries might actually have more genuine leverage here than this framing initially suggests, potentially able to play both major frameworks against each other for their own specific individual benefit rather than being purely forced to pick one exclusively

[AlignmentShark]

The Pax Silica and Waico overlap without directly competing framing is honestly a pretty generous read of what's clearly still fundamentally a competitive positioning exercise underneath either way.

Both initiatives are still fundamentally about extending each country's own specific influence globally. Cooperation rhetoric doesn't erase that underlying competitive reality

[Slow Hollow]

Genuinely skeptical real cooperation survives once actual competitive stakes get high enough between two major rival powers like this. History honestly doesn't offer many clean examples of rivals cooperating meaningfully once the underlying competition turns genuinely existential feeling to either side

[Glacier53]

Forcing smaller countries into a binary choice between two competing frameworks feels like the actual practical harm buried underneath all this high level geopolitical rivalry rhetoric. Countries genuinely caught in the middle rarely benefit from that kind of forced pressure. Worth centering their actual position more in this debate

[Di46]

AI genuinely not waiting for rivalries to subside is the strongest actual point in this whole piece honestly, since the technology's real risks and real benefits don't particularly care which specific country's political framework currently happens to be winning any given diplomatic argument