China's AI push echoes its maritime power play

The article draws a direct parallel between China's conduct in two domains: maritime governance and AI development. A decade ago, lawyer Paul Reichler secured a landmark victory for the Philippines at the International Court of Justice, where a UN panel unanimously rejected China's expansive maritime claims. Yet China disregarded that verdict and has since pursued a pattern of coercion—blocking undersea resource exploration, enforcing fishing bans, and dredging artificial islands—rather than respecting the rules-based international order the ruling represented. Now, as China pitches itself to developing nations as a benign supplier of open-source AI models, Reichler and others worry the same dynamic is unfolding in the digital realm: Beijing seeks to lock smaller countries into technological dependencies that serve its interests, much as it has done with maritime resources. The core concern is that both superpowers—China and the US—are increasingly willing to operate outside established norms when it serves their strategic interests, whether in disputed waters or the AI supply chain. This represents a fundamental shift from a rules-based global order toward one in which geopolitical power determines outcomes.