Sam Winter-Levy
Introduction
How widely should the United States share its artificial intelligence (AI) technologies? This question may soon become a defining issue for U.S. foreign policy and economic strategy, yet it has received surprisingly limited public attention. While Washington focuses intensely on constraining AI advances by China, another group of emerging economies—including states like Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE)—are increasingly positioning themselves as influential players in the AI landscape. U.S. policymakers are only just beginning to grapple with the opportunities and dilemmas posed by such countries’ AI aspirations.
On the one hand, the growing global appetite for U.S. AI technology—including advanced chips, massive data centers, and frontier models—can be a source of leverage to court so-called swing states and shore up American influence. And U.S. technology companies, facing increasingly steep capital, land, and energy requirements as they scramble to conduct what one analyst has called “the largest infrastructure buildout that humanity has ever seen,” see partnerships with various foreign countries as an answer to many of their prayers. Yet the proliferation of powerful AI systems, even to ostensibly friendly nations, comes with serious risks—including intellectual property theft, misuse by authoritarian regimes, and the siphoning of some of the United States’ most advanced technologies to the Chinese military and other adversaries. Balancing these interests will be a central task for U.S. policymakers for years and probably decades to come.
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