As China pushes ahead to dominate the global AI stack, Washington will need leverage. And the best leverage the US has is investing in allied scale – building the global tech alliances to take advantage of partners’ capabilities will be the key to a Western global tech stack. And the US administration is taking action to identify opportunities.
Last month, the White House released the first US National Security Science & Technology Strategy (NSSTS) since the Clinton administration in 1995. The NSSTS states the challenge in stark terms: “Potential adversaries seek asymmetric capabilities to counter US military superiority,” as well as the “means to disrupt and exploit complex, interconnected national and global economies, supply chains, and infrastructure.”
[Great summary of the NSSTS by Ryan Fedasiuk]
1/ The White House is out with a new National Security Science & Technology Strategy. At 24 pages, it actually makes (some) choices.
— Ryan Fedasiuk (@RyanFedasiuk) August 18, 2026
The central idea is that America should stop treating tech competition as a contest to lead everywhere. pic.twitter.com/qgHXRIlV1I
The Strategy’s answer: America first does not mean America alone. Rather, it is “deeper cooperation with allies and partners is essential to protecting America’s innovation base.” The NSSTS calls for closer allied coordination on shaping global tech governance standards, research security, investment security, and supply chain security, and treats bilateral partnerships in AI, nuclear energy, quantum, critical minerals, and defense industrial bases as central to competing with China. Earlier this year, CEPA’s Tech 2030: A Roadmap for Europe-US Tech Cooperation pushed forward many of these recommendations.
Tech 2030: A Roadmap for Europe-US Tech Cooperation
A US-Europe tech partnership is key to independence from China.
US allies, who may be frustrated with the Administration in other areas, should take notice of the strategic opportunity being laid out on tech. In addition to the NSSTS, over the last two years, Washington has created new avenues to build out allied scale. Through the American AI Exports Program, the US is assembling full-stack packages of US chips, models, and standards so that partner governments can build on American infrastructure rather than Chinese infrastructure. Its Technology Prosperity Deals with the United Kingdom, Sweden, Japan, and South Korea tie allied capital and research to shared priorities in AI, quantum, and nuclear energy. Under Pax Silica, the US and 24 partners are “advancing [a] new economic security consensus among allies and trusted partners” to pull critical supply chains out of Beijing’s orbit.
It’s true that allies won’t be able to have their cake and eat it too: the choice between partnership with the US vs. China when it comes to critical technologies is one that allies will have to make. And it should be an easy decision – China is intent on destroying Western alliances, and its tech capabilities and investments are far from benign.
None of it will be lost on General Secretary Xi Jinping when he meets President Trump in Washington on September 24. Beijing is not waiting. In July, Xi pitched China as the leader of a new global AI order and floated a Shanghai-based world AI cooperation body to set the terms for the developing world. Chinese firms are moving just as fast on the ground, with Huawei bidding to build Egypt’s national AI data centers on its own Ascend chips. Beijing’s pitch is simple and seductive: financing, hardware, and infrastructure, with no democratic strings attached.
The harder question for Washington is not whether it can sign allies onto a deal, but whether it can build alliances that outlast any single administration. We have been here before. The EU-US Trade and Technology Council, launched in 2021, was meant to be exactly this kind of standing forum, coordinating export controls, AI norms, and supply chains across the Atlantic. It produced useful working groups but little endured, and it has since faded from view. The administration’s bilateral deals are faster and more concrete, but a tech alliance fit for the future won’t be sustainable if it’s between governments alone.
Political leaders can provide the signals, but the engine of the technology race is industry: from banks to tech companies, defense firms, automakers and start-ups – every private sector firm has a stake in the game. Innovators, researchers, and standards bodies that actually build the stack, will also need to be at the table.
To get there, we have to start playing the long game of turning a set of initiatives into a global architecture that is sustainable and enduring from innovation to scale and governance.
