CONCEPT
AI Industrial Policy
The strategic deployment of public resources, regulatory frameworks, and trade instruments to build domestic AI capability — practiced aggressively by the leading nations, prohibited or discouraged for the rest, and the central determinant of who participates in the AI economy as producer rather than consumer.
AI industrial policy is the contemporary application of strategic state intervention to the technology that is reshaping global economic structure. The leading practitioners — the United States, China, the European Union — deploy a comprehensive toolkit: direct subsidies for compute infrastructure, public funding of basic research, export controls on advanced chips, technology transfer restrictions, government procurement preferences, and regulatory frameworks designed to advantage domestic firms.
Chang's framework illuminates what makes AI industrial policy distinctive and what makes it familiar. It is distinctive because the technology operates at unprecedented scale and speed. It is familiar because the structural pattern — wealthy nations deploying strategic intervention while preventing developing nations from doing the same — is the consistent feature of every previous round of industrial development. The question for the next decade is whether developing nations will be allowed the policy space to build domestic AI capability, or whether the rules being