Real Vision co-founder Raoul Pal says the artificial intelligence competition between the U.S. and China is unlike any geopolitical rivalry in history, a race not for territory or weapons, but for the substratum of intelligence itself.
Key Takeaways:
Real Vision’s Raoul Pal called the U.S.-China AI race “unlike any rivalry in history” in a May 18 post on X. Pal proposed Universal Basic Equity at Consensus 2026 in Miami as AI threatens to automate large-scale knowledge work.A report has found China winning key AI dimensions, particularly efficiency and deployment, despite the U.S. leading in compute.“The U.S.-China AI race is a race no one can win and no one can afford to lose. Every great power competition in history was for territory, resources, or weapons. This one is the first that is for none of them. It is a race for the substrate of intelligence itself.”
His comments arrive as the AI race between the two largest economies has reached a critical juncture, with both nations pursuing radically different strategies. While the U.S. retains a clear lead at the technological frontier, particularly in compute scale, model performance, and large language model (LLM) development, China has pivoted toward a model built on efficiency gains, open-source diffusion, and deep integration of AI into physical-world systems.
Rather than competing for a single AGI breakthrough, China has fragmented its strategy across multiple simultaneous races, be it model efficiency, AI adoption, or AI-controlled industrial systems.
Why Crypto Ownership and Universal Equity MatterFor Pal, the competitive stakes extend beyond pure technology into economic architecture. Speaking at Consensus 2026 in Miami, he proposed a concept called ‘Universal Basic Equity’ which gives citizens ownership stakes in AI systems as a structural response to the labor displacement expected as AI automates knowledge work at scale.
The proposal seems to align with Pal’s longstanding view that crypto-native ownership models may be better positioned than governments to distribute the economic gains from AI in the long run.
What Pal’s framing adds to that picture is a philosophical dimension, i.e., the stakes may be unlike anything a geopolitical competition has involved before, since previous rivalries over territory, energy, or weapons were ultimately contests over finite resources. Intelligence and the systems that generate it are not analogous in the same way. That distinction, if Pal is right, can make the outcome of this race structurally different from anything that preceded it.
