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Six months ago, your humble correspondent predicted a “Hot Patent Summer” filled with racy legislative action on sizzling intellectual property issues. That heat never quite boiled over, but as temperatures cool and December turns to January, what progress has been made on these measures? Recall that, over the summer, the Senate’s leading avatars of legislative patent reform, Sens. Chris Coons (D-DE) and Thom Tillis (R-NC), introduced two signature bills seeking to level the playing field for inventors and to juice American innovation as the economy continues to struggle to recover from its COVID-19 doldrums. The first measure, entitled the Patent Eligibility Restoration Act of 2023 (PERA), aims to restore common sense to the controversial question of what subject matter should receive patent protection. A nearly ten-year-old Supreme Court decision muddied the waters of patent eligibility and led to the elimination of hundreds of patents. A recent Washington and Lee University law review article revealed that this decision and its progeny has, among other things, reduced investment in the medical diagnostics industry by some $9.3 billion. Noting the “extensive confusion and a lack of consistency” prevailing in the field, Tillis and Coons pledged to reform patent eligibility law to bring vital clarity for inventors and innovators and ensure the United States maintains its competitive edge.” In addition to bolstering the diagnostics field, the greater clarity PERA aims to deliver would spark more innovation in artificial intelligence, telecommunications, and other critical industries. At the same time, Coons and Tillis, joined by Sens. Mazie Hirono (D-HI) and Richard Durbin (D-IL), also introduced the Promoting and Respecting Economically Vital American Innovation Leadership Act (PREVAIL) Act of 2023. A month later, Reps. Ken Buck (R-CO) and Deborah Ross (D-NC) introduced the same bill in the House. As Buck and Ross wrote in a press release, the PREVAIL Act seeks to reform the Patent Trial and Appeals Board (PTAB)—the tribunal first convened in 2013 to more easily and swiftly dispose of unworthy patents but has, in the eyes of many, done so overzealously. PREVAIL would require standing for PTAB challengers, harmonizing the interpretation of claims and the burden of proof between the PTAB and district courts, impeding duplicative patent challenges by requiring a party to choose between challenge a patent in district court or before the PTAB, and prohibiting the director of the US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) from influencing PTAB rulings. As Ross said recently at a panel at the Center for Strategic and International Studies moderated by my former colleague Andrei Iancu, who previously served as the USPTO director, the PTAB and the district court currently provide “two different venues . . . two standards of proof, that creates a quagmire for the small inventor.” At that panel, Henry Hadad, a senior vice president and deputy general counsel at Bristol-Myers Squibb observed that, unfortunately, the PTAB has recently been marred by embracing “the primary basis for invalidating patents based on a limited record, limited witnesses, an inability to test the veracity of witnesses on cross examination.” But as meritorious as both measures seem, neither has advanced particularly far since their introductions in June. And with an election year ahead, their prospects of making significant progress in Congress traditionally would not be especially high. However, given the sluggish economy, the need for members of Congress facing reelection to demonstrate accomplishments, and the paramount importance of innovation to the economy, further action on these bills may prove irresistible—even in the cold months ahead.

A coalition of tech companies, retailers and tech activist groups lined up on Monday in opposition to the latest legislative effort to limit patent invalidation in the courts, warning that unseating legal precedents over eligibility would lead to a coming “wave of crippling litigation.”

Called the Patent Eligibility Restoration Act of 2023, the law would create new boundaries for when a patent can be invalidated under Section 101 of the Patent Act that would wipe away a decade of judicial decisions on eligibility that attorneys often say are unpredictable. The industry groups, joined also by more activist-bent advocacy groups like the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the center-right think tank the R Street Institute, painted a grim picture of a world with more patent rights.

Much has been made about how the U.S. House’s draft of the Farm Bill—that massive omnibus legislation that governs our food system—stands little chance of advancing. Whether the potential cuts to food assistance, or its lack of attention to climate change, the 900 page-plus bill moving through the House is being slammed by Democrats in the Senate and House alike.

Posturing from both sides aside, Democrats and Republicans should work across differences and pass a Farm Bill before electoral campaigns in the fall put legislative activities on hiatus.

Former House Agriculture Committee Chair Collin Peterson sees a path forward for the farm provisions of the bill. “The way the debate happened did not put anybody into any corners that they couldn’t get out of,” said Peterson. “Most of the divisiveness was over how to pay for this; it was over food stamps; it was over the sideboards on conservation; it was over the CCC. Those are things I think can be worked out.” It will likely be September before this bill advances to the House floor. Peterson, who now leads the Midwest Council on Agriculture, says more work will happen ahead of that vote. “The fact that we got four Democrats that voted for the bill gives us a place to start to build a bipartisan coalition that can get this bill through the floor of the House. There are a lot of Republicans that are going to vote against this on the floor so we’re going to need 20, 30 Democrats at least to get this bill passed.”

The director of the Gardner Agriculture Policy Program at the University of Illinois says he’s slightly more optimistic about Congress passing a new farm bill.

Jonathan Coppess tells Brownfield…

Sen. Debbie Stabenow (D-MI) risks leaving the Senate at the end of the year with a big question mark hanging over her almost three-decade career in Washington.

As the top Democrat on the Agriculture Committee, she is waging her third and final fight over the farm bill, which sets agriculture and nutrition policy every five years, yet she may retire with the latest package stuck in limbo.

“A lot of people forget why we need a five-year farm bill, why it’s so necessary to balance fiscal responsibility reform with anticipatory policy and why the legislation we pass today ought to reflect the needs of agriculture producers and consumers. It’s because farm bills are felt in every corner of America, in every field and pasture, in every grocery story and agribusiness. The legislation we pass today will have ripple effects for years to come,” Rep. Tracey Mann (R-Kan.) said at a House Agriculture Committee meeting in late May. The 2018 farm bill authorized the administration to reevaluate the formula used to calculate food assistance, which Biden leveraged in 2021 to approve the largest-ever increase in SNAP benefits. The 2018 bill also guaranteed minimum prices for certain agriculture products — promising that the government would pay the difference between the market price and what are known as “reference prices.” But those levels haven’t changed despite the subsequent upheaval in global markets and rising inflation. That means producers have struggled without as much help as Congress may have envisioned, Kieffer said.

Republicans are trying to push those levels up. House Agriculture Committee Chairman Glenn Thompson (R-Pa.) advanced legislation in late May that would pour billions of dollars into raising the price floors for agricultural commodities by as much as 20 percent. Soybeans, which in April traded at $11.80 a bushel, according to the Agriculture Department, would have a guaranteed price of $10 under the legislation, up from $8.40. Wheat in April traded at $5.91 a bushel and would have a $6.35 price floor, up from $5.50.

WASHINGTON — Republicans on the U.S. Senate Committee on Agriculture, Nutrition, and Forestry on Tuesday released their framework for a new five-year farm bill that will set the policy and funding levels for key food, agriculture and conservation programs. The top Republican on the committee, Arkansas Sen. John Boozman, laid out GOP priorities with reporters during a Tuesday morning briefing prior to publication of the framework.

Those priorities include an increase in reference prices for all covered commodities; increased spending for conservation programs by pulling funds from climate legislation passed in 2022; “cost-neutral” updates to the formula that calculates benefits for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, known as SNAP; increased crop insurance levels; and reporting requirements for foreign purchase and ownership of farmland.

Humans have fought over food and the means of producing it for 20,000 years, as rock art in Australia shows. Food, water and land scarcity are primary drivers in two thirds of modern conflicts today. Indeed, many people seem to have forgotten that the primary German war aim in World War II was to take farmland from the Soviets and put German farmers on it. It is very likely that controlling the Ukraine’s bountiful and reliable food bowl is among Putin’s main aims also. In the short run this is imposing hunger and even starvation on hundreds of millions of people far beyond Europe. 

Spreading hunger in turn snowballs into government failures, civil wars and refugee tsunamis around the world – as it did in 2008 when a shortfall in Ukrainian grain exports led to revolutions in three Arab countries. Already, a third of a billion people – equal to the entire population of Europe – leave their homes each year, either as refugees or economic migrants, to seek better lives in countries which seem more stable and food secure. War will add to the flood.

For better or worse, Americans are not just what we eat, we are the laws that govern what we eat. As agriculture leaders in Congress deliberate over the 2023 Farm Bill, they must confront the need for historic shifts in our food-policy diet — a momentous legislative cleanse, if you will.

Every five years, Congress revises this behemoth 1,000-page bill, reauthorizing some $800 billion in food and agriculture programs that oversee everything from farm subsidies and crop insurance to food-relief programs and organic standards. In the past half-century — since President Richard Nixon’s Secretary of Agriculture Earl Butz told farmers to “Get big or get out!” — those allocations have overwhelmingly benefitted the largest producers of meat, grains and fresh fruits and vegetables in the industry.

The stakes are high as Congress begins serious discussions to reauthorize the farm bill, which expires at the end of September 2023. Among other things, this legislation represents a major opportunity to enable private landowners, farmers, ranchers, and rural communities to take action to address the crises of climate change and nature loss.

In fact, in a divided Congress where House majority leadership has staked out an obstructionist position on most climate action, the must-pass farm bill may represent the only meaningful opportunity to make progress on these issues in the 118th Congress. Conversely, if extreme positions prevail and Congress strips away farm bill program investments made in the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act, America will take a massive step backward on climate, conservation, and rural prosperity.

Wittlin et al ’18 (Maggie, Lisa Larrimore Ouellette, and Gregory N. Mandel, all professors of law, “What Causes Polarization on IP Policy?,” University of California, Davis [Vol. 52; 1193], )

The rise in the global economic importance of intellectual property (“IP”) has been accompanied by a rise in polarization on IP issues.1 In response to both trends, we have witnessed a dramatic increase in empirical efforts to understand how IP systems function (or fail).2 Yet this growth in the quality and quantity of evidence on IP issues has not reduced disagreement on socially optimal IP policy. As one prominent example, when Congress was debating patent reform legislation in 2015, over fifty law and economics professors wrote to Congress to respond to those “who claim there is little empirical evidence available to assess the performance of the American patent system.”3 To the contrary, they contended that “a large and increasing body of evidence indicates that the net effect of patent litigation is to raise the cost of innovation and inhibit technological progress, subverting the very purpose of the patent system.”4 This letter in turn sparked a response from another forty professors who called the studies cited by the first letter “flawed, unreliable, or incomplete.”5 Both letters referenced a surge in empirical IP evidence, but diverged starkly concerning the evidence’s implications. Despite — or perhaps because of — this trend of polarization, there continues to be a cacophony of calls for further and more precise research to resolve IP policy questions.6

The U.S. House of Representatives Agriculture Committee completed its markup of the Farm, Food and National Security Act of 2024, more commonly known as the farm bill, on May 24, and passed the proposed legislation by a vote of 33-21. However, though the farm bill has historically enjoyed bipartisan support, many pundits and members of Congress expect the Democrat-controlled Senate to put forth a very different piece of the $1.5 trillion legislation than any that might pass on the floor of the Republican-led House. House ag leaders are working on a version of the bill that is expected to spend less on future low-income food assistance and more on large-scale commodity production, while the Senate appears to be mulling proposals to do just the opposite.

A new farm bill is typically passed every five years. The comprehensive package is the federal government’s biggest tool in helping ensure the U.S. food supply remains secure. The previous one was passed before the COVID-19 pandemic snarled supply chains and caused massive inflation, before the war between agricultural giants Russia and Ukraine began, before the price of farmland skyrocketed and before the Biden administration passed climate policy that heavily impacts agricultural producers. So passage of a new farm bill is clearly a priority for both Congress and the industry.

Edward Said's Orientalism gave those unable to think for themselves a formula. His work had the attraction of an all-purpose tool his acolytes eager, intellectually unprepared, aesthetically unsophisticated-could apply to every cultural phenomenon without having to think critically or having to conduct any real archival research requiring mastery of languages, or research in the field requiring the mastery of technique and a rigorous methodology. Said's Orientalism displays all the laziness and arrogance of the man of letters who does not havemuch time for empirical research, or, above all, for making sense ofits results. His method derives from the work of fashionable French intellectuals and theorists. Existentialists, structuralists, deconstructionists, and postmodernists all postulate grandiose theories, but, unfortunately, these are based on flimsy historical or empirical foundations. Claude Levi-Strauss, with just a few years of field work in Brazil, constructed a grand theory about the structures of the human mind. As Edmund Leach put it in his short monograph on Levi-Strauss, the French anthropologist never bothered to learn the native languages, never spent more than a few weeks in one place; the subsequent model, peppered with Marxist jargon, that he concocted on such meager empirical foundations is "little more than an amalgam" of his "own prejudiced presuppositions." Leach continues, "Levi-Strauss ... is insufficiently critical of his source material. He always seems to be able to find just what he is looking for. Any evidence, however dubious, is acceptable so long as it fits with logically calculated expectations; but wherever the data run counter to the theory Levi-Strauss will either bypass the evidence or marshal the full resources of his powerful invective to have the heresy thrown out of court.... [H]e consistently behaves like an advocate defending a cause rather than a scientist searching for ultimate truth."' This tradition was carried on by Michel Foucault, surely one of the great charlatans of modern times. Said, influenced by Foucault, Marx, and the French intellectual tradition, refuses to acknowledge evidence that does not fit into hisalready prepared Procrustean bed; evidence such as the work of German Orientalistsor the evidence of Indian Orientalists who praise the scholarly contribution of their European colleagues. Generally speaking, Said's thinking can be characterized as "ideological."An ideologue is immune to argument; he believes his ideas about man, history, and society to be self-evident, and anyone opposing them to be either stupid or malevolent. He cannot lose since his interpretation has already been determined in advance of observations. His attitude is immune to facts or reality, and no argument will ever disprove him.' The ideology is a way of interpreting the world: I can shut out recalcitrant data, I can shut my eyes if necessary.' Ideology is a method of substituting sweeping structural explanations for empirical investigation; for the ideologues, all the failings of his target group are the systematic products of its core identity. In cultures already immune to self-criticism, Said helped Muslims, and particularly Arabs, perfect their already well-developed sense of self-pity. There is a kind of comfort and absolution in being told that none of your problems are of your making, that you do not have to accept any responsibility for the ills besetting your society. It is all the fault of the West,of infidels. There is no need even to take responsibility for selfdetermination, it is easier to accept money from the Western donors and to treat it as one's rightful due from them, that is, a kind of jizyah. The attraction of Said's thesis for third-world intellectuals is thus easily understandable. But why was it so successful among Western intellectuals? Post-World War II Western intellectuals and leftists were consumed by guilt for the West's colonial past and continuing colonialist present, and they wholeheartedly embraced any theory or ideology that voiced or at least seemed to voice the putatively thwarted aspirations of the peoples of the third world. Orientalism came at the precise time when anti-Western rhetoric was at its most shrill and was already being taught at Western universities, and when third-worldism was at its most popular. Jean-Paul Sartre preached that all white men were complicit in the exploitation of the third world, and that violence against Westerners was a legitimate means for colonized men to re-acquire their manhood., Said went further: "It is therefore correct that every European, in what he could say about the Orient, was consequently a racist, an imperialist, and almost totally ethnocentric"(p. 204). Not only, for Said, is every European a racist, but he must necessarily be so. As I have argued, Western civilization has been more willing to criticize itself than any other major culture. These self-administered admonishments are a far cry from Said's savage strictures, and yet they found a new generation ready to take them to heart. Berating and blaming the West, a fashionable game in the 1960s and 1970s that impressionable youth took seriously, had the results we now see when the same generation appears unwilling to defend the West against the greatest threat that it has faced since the Nazis.When shown that Said is indeed a fraud, his friends and supporters in academia sidestep the criticisms and evidence, and pretend, as did several reviewers of Robert Irwin's book on Said, that Said may indeed have got the "footling details" wrong but he was, nonetheless, onto a higher truth. Said's influence, thus, was a result of a conjunction of several intellectual and political trends: post-French Algeria and post-Vietnam tiers mondisme (third-worldism); the politicization of increasingly postmodernist English departments that had argued away the very idea of truth, objective truth; and the influence of Foucault. In effect Said played on each of these confidence tricks to create a master fraud that bound American academicsand Middle East tyrants in unstated bonds of anti American complicity'In Said's works there is no room for historical comparisons. The West alone stands, tried on the basis of a few examples taken out of historical context, judged and condemned as the source of all evil. There was slavery in the West, but, as pointed out above, the West itself took the first steps to actually abolish it. Indeed, abolitionism, as Olivier Petre-Grenouilleau reminds us in his pathbreaking comparative study,' was an Occidental concept that did not resonate in either black Africa or the Islamic world. In his study of the slave trade in the Ottoman Empire in the nineteenth century, Ehud R. Toledano wrote, "Accepted by custom, perpetuated by tradition and sanctioned by religion, slavery was an integral part of Ottoman society." He further adds that no abolitionist movement ever emerged in the Ottoman Empire. On the contrary, Ottoman politics can be characterized as a continual resistance of varying intensity to British abolitionist pressure. Slavery was taken for granted and abolitionism was considered a foreign, English idea-barely understood, let alone accepted.' Turkish historian Y H. Erdem confirms Toledano's findings; there was no organized abolitionist movement in the Ottoman Empire, no abolitionist tracts popularizing the subject and bringing home the suffering of the slaves. Moreover, in modern Turkey, continues Erdem, the abolition of slavery is not a part of the educational curriculum, and there is no specific date for abolition that could have been used as a point of departure for such a study.9

According to Edward Said’s Foucauldian take on imperial discourse, the cultural construct of Orientalism was the European imperialistic strategy of composing a positive image of the western Self while casting the ‘East’ as its negative alter ego, alluring and exotic, dangerous and mysterious, always the Other. As such, ‘the Orient has helped to define Europe (or the West) as its contrasting image, idea, personality, experience’ (Said 2003: 1–2), emerging as an intricate part of western culture itself and as a way to face internal contradictions. Self-evidently, Orientalism still persists in both popular and institutional constructions of culture and identity, but has developed in a rather curious trajectory over the last few decades. One direction of particular interest has been identified and designated as ‘re-Orientalism’ (Lau 2009), where ‘Orientals’ are seen to be perpetrating Orientalisms no less than ‘non-Orientals’ and, moreover, perpetrating certain and selected types of Orientalisms. Where Said’s Orientalism is grounded in how the West constructs the ‘Orient’ and the ‘Occident’, re-Orientalism is based on how cultural producers with eastern affiliations come to terms with an Orientalized East, whether by complying with perceived expectations of western readers, by playing (along) with them or by discarding them altogether. As a consequence, the present critical project aims to situate itself within the reconfiguration of modes of cultural analysis that observe, identify and comment the operations of new Orientalisms in the twenty-first century. Re-Orientalist discursive practices and rhetorical strategies are often sites of subversion where meanings are in constant flux. In this sense, re-Orientalism theory exposes the power of Orientalist discourse while underscoring its instability and mutability, and as such provides avenues for questioning the endurance of Orientalist practices today.

One purpose of this collection is to observe how re-Orientalism is deployed, made to circulate and perceived by cultural producers and consumers within the specific context of South Asian identity politics. The concept of re-Orientalism is applicable in a large number of Asian contexts; this volume case studies South Asia and South Asian diasporic cultural formations, illustrating the delicate negotiation of power and influence within the spaces of South Asian textual practices, specifically in literary works and through the media of film and television. This collection therefore places itself at the centre of a politics of power and representation; one which is not pitting the ‘West’ against the ‘East’, 1 but strives for a much more complex and nuanced understanding – an understanding that could not be confined within those discursive structures – of postcolonial cultural production and its engendering of re-Orientalist perspectives. In fact, this project is attentive to the implications of the heterogeneity embedded in categories such as the West and the East, given that, as Said influentially argued, ‘the ontological and epistemological distinction … between “the Orient” and … ”the Occident”’ (Said 2003: 2) resulted from a colonial discursive power structure devised for ‘dominating, restructuring and having authority over the Orient’ (Said 2003: 3).

The term Orientalism, like Latinism and Hellenism, refers to the discipline which can now be equated with Middle Eastern studies. The Orient, in the 19th century European usage of the word, meant the Arab world or generally the Middle East; it did not include India, China or the Far East. The Orient, literally the sunrise, pointed above all to the region that lay immediately to the east of Europe.1 Therefore Orientalism, like other branches of area studies, aims to understand and analyse Middle Eastern affairs in an academic milieu. In Edward Said's view, however, the discipline of Orientalism is but a crystallisation of a hostile ideology in Western scholarship.2 In his masterpiece, Orientalism, Said deeply and comprehensively researched the historical construction of this ideology.3 Published for the first time in 1978, Orientalism traces the various phases of relationship between the West and Islam, from the Napoleonic invasion of Egypt, through the colonial period and the rise of modern Orientalist scholarship in Britain and France during the 19th century. It continues up to the end of European imperial hegemony in the Orient after World War II and on to the emergence of US dominance. As Said illustrates, the vast corpus of Orientalism was to legitimise and promote Western superiority and dominance by inventing the ideology of the West-and-Islam dualism. In this article dualism is used to denote a way of thinking that promotes duality between 'the self and 'the other' in order to justify and naturalise some structured patterns of domination and exploitation. By portraying 'them' as lesser in humanity or lower in the great chain of being, dualism is employed to legitimise some implications of hierarchical power and to show who gets what, when and how. The critical part of dualistic thought is not that there is merely a difference which can be found between each pair of people, but a dramatic difference, a 'difference by nature', ie an essential otherness which makes a specific group of people less human and hence subject to domination by another complete human being. In the social and political realms the main intention behind promoting dualistic thought is usually to justify the way 'we' treat 'them', even if we, as human beings, do not want to be treated in a similar way. The core of a dualistic argument, thus, is that 'they' are essentially different, totally dismissing their commonalities with us as members of the human race

This overt play on internal resistance to Orientalism by those who have been designated the demonized Other is central to the aesthetic rationale of the performance of ReOrientalism.The use of varied media – performance text, visual art, traditional and fusion music – marks an act of generic boundary crossing and cultural sabotage that works to directly deconstruct polarized and polarizing media presentations of the East. ReOrientalism thus draws attention to the instability of its discursive status in a way that provokes its audience to ask pertinent questions about the production and consumption of the “Oriental”, unsettling easy distinctions, so that it is no longer clear who exactly is the agent of Re-Orientalism and who is being interpellated and for what ends. Self-consciously presented as a critique of Orientalist discourse, it nevertheless plays to the gallery in its appeal to the Western consumption of the Orient marking a process of cultural transaction that implicates both the performers and audience.The act of interpellating the Oriental subject is unsettling:the locus of Oriental identity carried into an endlessly deferred and open process of subject constitution marked by the “ReOrientalism” of ongoing performance. The “Oriental” is split and held in suspension between the constructed authenticity of the “Orient” and the authorizations of the audience and the emergent, diasporized self. It is a process that invokes the reality of discursive power while working to disengage itself from the binary registers of Said’s Orientalism. The self-consciously performative and diasporic basis of this act of cultural deconstruction and reclamation works to unsettle the pedagogic drives and hierarchic, binary prescriptions that mark distinctions between the “Orient” and “Occident”.The diasporic subject is presented as both agent and victim of Orientalism and their appropriation of Orientalism works to foreground the internal inconsistencies and instabilities of Orientalist interpellation when situated in a culturally conflictual borderland. The Western audience issimultaneously displaced from its position as a passive consumer of an Orientalist cultural product, its members interpellated as active agents who are compelled to negotiate and navigate the instabilities of this fluid cultural terrain.

To counter China’s buildout, the Biden administration can’t just drop its efforts to build international AI guardrails. But it must integrate them into a broader campaign to empower the Global South with AI while advancing democratic principles for how it is managed. History offers a promising example: President Dwight Eisenhower’s 1953 “Atoms for Peace” speech at the United Nations General Assembly, which called for nuclear states to divert fissile bomb-making materials to the UN for use in nuclear energy for developing nations. Today, it is widely credited with having laid the foundation for the International Atomic Energy Agency, a body that many influential thinkers now see as a model for future AI controls. Eisenhower’s genius was in directly tying nuclear safeguards to a bold proposal to empower other countries with nuclear technologies. Not only did that proposal generate sufficient global goodwill to stand up the IAEA, it also inadvertently outfitted the IAEA with the dual mandate that has been a key element of its success — closely linking proactive, peaceful diffusion of the technology with controls on its most dangerous applications. Daunting as the prospects of AI-powered bioterrorism or catastrophic cyber-attacks may be, history shows that the best way to curtail the risks of transformational technologies is to be wise and deliberate in guiding their spread, rather than attempting to block them altogether. AI tools have already demonstrated a host of powerful benefits that could help alleviate overstretched healthcare systems, crop depletion, and other problems facing many nations in the Global South, and the United States — with its leading universities, strong private sector and active agencies — is far better positioned than China to help them benefit. If the U.S. took the initiative to equip AI “have nots” with the scarce resources needed to build their own AI economies, it would send a clear message that the United States intends to empower the world with AI and not dominate it, contrary to China’s claims. It could also help ensure that safety, responsibility and democratic values remain central to the world’s AI development by offering access to cloud computing resources — but making that access contingent on rigorous standards and safeguards. If done well, such a cloud network could even help the United States steer China’s own AI development in more positive directions. The U.S. has unrivaled potential to play a decisive role in shaping the development of the world’s AI ecosystems and needs only the vision to do so. Diplomatic efforts like the AI Safety Summit have their place but will be far more effective if they’re connected to an active campaign to counter China’s push to roll out practical AI capabilities for the developing world. To lead the world in the AI revolution, the United States will have to do more than garner diplomatic consensus around its principles for safety and responsibility — it must empower countries to build AI tools with those principles baked in.

— Chinese tech companies were  the United Arab Emirates’ preeminent AI company, which in turn  the world’s largest AI supercomputer.

The upshot may well be an AI future in which the United States’ and Europe’s painstaking agreements on safe, rights-respecting AI are rendered obsolete by a world already hardwired with Chinese AI systems — winning Beijing favor among non-Western nations and setting de facto authoritarian standards for the technology’s development globally. For China observers, this will sound familiar. Beijing has already financed and built massive global infrastructure through its Belt and Road Initiative in an effort to create both economic reliance and political loyalty.

This fall, the Western world has galvanized around a blitz of AI initiatives, statements and multilateral deals — not least the Biden administration’s executive order and the U.K.’s Bletchley declaration — all geared to setting global rules for a fast-moving, competitive and possibly dangerous new technology.

China is taking a different path, one that could give it a lead while the West talks. Rather than competing with the West to write the rules of the road for AI, Beijing is instead building the road itself, working with allies and client nations to construct Chinese-built AI ecosystems that could pose global risks if they take root and expand.