We just published our first brief and there was really only one topic worth starting with.
The US–China AI race — not from a tech spec perspective, not from a benchmark perspective, but from a nation branding and soft power perspective.
And what we found surprised us.
China isn't just building better models. It's exporting the infrastructure layer of global AI through open-source licenses.
When a startup in Lagos, a developer in Berlin, or a student in São Paulo builds on a Qwen or DeepSeek model, they're building on Chinese world-models. Chinese values. Chinese defaults.
That's influence without presence.
The US still holds the frontier ceiling: ChatGPT at 900M weekly users, Claude and Gemini dominating enterprise. But winning in AI is no longer just about who has the best model. It's about who becomes the default infrastructure that the rest of the world builds on top of.
Soft power has always been about who shapes the stories, the systems, and the standards others build on.