Politics of Artificial Intelligence Adoption: Unpacking the Regime Type Debate

What determines whether a country imports high-technology artificial intelligence (A.I.) products from the United States and China? Over the last decade, a growing body of literature began focusing on regime types and argue that authoritarian countries tend to import A.I. from China, whereas democratic countries from the United States. In this study, we test this regime-type hypothesis and find that both the US and China export to authoritarian and democratic countries alike, with China exporting to a larger number of countries. By employing multinomial logit with three leading A.I. trade datasets from Stanford University, Carnegie Endowment and World Bank, we find that Chinese A.I. exports are not driven by regime type, whereas American exports are. US A.I. exports are geared towards a smaller market of wealthy nations, whereas China supplies to a broader market that is made up of a variety of regime types and GDP levels. Furthermore, we find that more countries import surveillance and policing-related A.I. products from the United States, compared to China, debunking a common mainstream view. We conclude by arguing military spending and GDP per capita are two of the strongest determinants of US A.I. exports, while a robust export pattern doesn’t emerge with Chinese A.I.