The US and China's AI rivalry affects Türkiye, which must chart its own AI course.

The US and China's strategic competition is unfolding on the front of artificial intelligence, with the world's attention turning to the Pacific. A group of leading American companies, including Microsoft and Nvidia, sent an open letter to the Trump administration regarding AI technology. The letter emphasized the importance of not restricting open-weight AI models, which allow an AI system's trained parameters to be downloaded and further developed by researchers and competitors.

US-China AI Rivalry

The US still leads in frontier development, producing 59 of the world's leading AI models in 2025, while China accounted for 74.2% of all AI patents granted worldwide in 2024. China also produced 17.76% of the world's AI-related academic publications, more than double America's share. The US, however, dominates private investment, with $285.9 billion, roughly 23 times China's $12.4 billion, as well as computing infrastructure, with 5,427 data centers to China's 449.

Implications for Türkiye

For middle powers like Türkiye, the growing rivalry between open and closed AI ecosystems represents both a warning and an opportunity. The critical question is no longer who develops the most advanced algorithms, but who controls access to key enablers of AI power, such as advanced semiconductors, computing infrastructure, data centers, and technical standards. Open-weight systems can lower the barrier to entry for states that lack the capital or chip access to train frontier models from scratch, offering a path toward sovereign AI capacity without full dependence on a single supplier.