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Latin America and Europe are bystanders in the US-China AI race, says Lula’s top adviser

The race for artificial intelligence has hardened into a two-power contest between the United States and China, fought over rare earths, data and the rules…

By Samantha Johnson / June 16, 2026

The race for artificial intelligence has hardened into a two-power contest between the United States and China, fought over rare earths, data and the rules governing the technology, with Latin America and Europe sidelined, Brazil’s top foreign policy adviser said on Tuesday.

Celso Amorim, a former foreign and defence minister, made the case at the Forte de Copacabana International Security Conference in Rio de Janeiro, an annual forum run by the Brazilian Centre for International Relations with the Konrad Adenauer Foundation and the European Union’s delegation in Brazil.

“We must recognise that neither Latin America nor Europe is leading the artificial intelligence race. What we see today are two poles, the United States and China,” Amorim said, adding that the gap will have practical consequences as technology “multiplies power, asymmetries and is never neutral”.

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Brazil’s answer, in his telling, is to pick neither side but to draw capital and technology from both. The chief architect of President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva’s foreign policy framed Brics and the Global South as the way to keep that balance.

That balance is harder to keep than it sounds, with the rivalry already crowding in on Brazil. Trump’s state visit to Beijing in May, where AI chips and critical minerals dominated the talks, settled little.
Washington has limited sales of Nvidia’s H200 chips to about 10 Chinese firms and blocked exports of its most advanced processors. Two weeks before the Rio speech, Trump signed an executive order tightening national security rules for AI firms, even as Beijing pushed a rival plan for global governance.

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