US President Donald Trump has been blunt about his AI ambitions and about who he considers America's main rival: China. His counterpart Xi Jinping has said nothing so forthright, but appears to hold a similar view.
How Beijing frames it
"China very much sees it as a race, they very much think China should be the leading force in AI — they see AI as a power maximiser," says Rebecca Arcesati of the Mercator Institute for China Studies.
The evidence sits beyond the rhetoric. AI has been a cornerstone of China's technological ambitions for more than a decade, whether or not Xi emphasises it publicly.
For Trump, beating China to AI supremacy outweighs any risk the technology poses to humans — something he has described as "a hoax". China's foreign ministry, for its part, warned that "narratives of threat" and confrontation hinder global AI governance, and called for cooperation so the technology benefits all.
Both positions are strategic rather than descriptive. A country ahead in a race has an interest in calling the risks overstated; a country catching up has an interest in calling for cooperative rules.
What it means in Bangladesh
Bangladesh is not in this race and will not be. That does not make it a spectator, because a technology race between two powers determines the terms on which everyone else buys.
The first consequence is that AI governance will not be settled multilaterally in the near term. If the two countries producing the technology treat restraint as a competitive disadvantage, there is no forum in which a country like Bangladesh negotiates a global standard. What is left is domestic rule-making, and the countries that write their own rules early are the ones that get to set conditions on what enters their market.
The second is procurement, and it is the practical one. Bangladesh's public and private systems are going to be built on models developed in one of these two jurisdictions. That is not a moral choice so much as an engineering one, and it carries specific obligations: knowing where inference runs, where citizen data goes, whether the vendor is subject to an export control that could withdraw the service, and whether the contract survives a change in either government's policy.
The third is the one that gets least attention. Both powers treat AI leadership as a national project with public money behind it. Bangladesh's realistic equivalent is not building foundation models — the compute cost alone makes that a non-starter — but ensuring the country is a competent buyer and adapter, which means Bangla-language datasets, local evaluation capacity, and enough public technical expertise to read a vendor's claims critically.
And there is a warning in Trump's word "hoax". Governments that treat a risk as rhetoric do not build the institutions that catch the failures. The countries that import the technology inherit the failures anyway. We looked at the naming fight over the same technology in renaming AI at the UN podium.
