Spring 2026 Events

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has rapidly shifted the way that societies view work and productivity. Often touted for its productivity gains in the workplace, AI also raises questions relating to geopolitics.  Large Language Models (LLMs) - a widely used manifestation of AI by people across all segments of society – takes on agency in shaping how the world is imagined, categorized, and contested. We argue that understanding geopolitical discourse through LLMs is illustrative of current political tensions between the world’s two largest geopolitical actors - the United States and China and is illustrative of a new form of global political phenomenon - ‘agentic geopolitics’ where computational systems assume an active role in shaping spatial imaginaries and political hierarchies. This paper analyzes and compares US and Chinese views on key geopolitical topics shaping contemporary US-China relations from the vantage points of two widely used LLMs - one American (ChatGPT) and one Chinese (DeepSeek) in order to understand how AI is generating distinctive discourses and understandings that are shaping distinctive ‘truths’ about how geopolitics is practiced today. Our analysis sheds light on the fault lines that comprise one of the world’s most important political relationships and serves as a contemporary reminder of how country-linked AI tools have the potential to exacerbate political tensions and divisions in ways that human driven diplomatic actions do not.

Bio

Davide Giacomo Zoppolato is a Fellow in Global China at New York University Shanghai. His research investigates China’s global engagements through the lenses of critical geopolitics, political economy, and computational social science. He examines how infrastructure, development finance, and media narratives shape geopolitical dynamics across the Global South. Zoppolato holds a PhD in Geography from West Virginia University, where his research focused on China–Pakistan geopolitics and included nine months of fieldworkalong the China–Pakistan Economic Corridor. He also holds a combined Bachelor’s and Master’s degree in Law (JD equivalent) from the University of Turin. His work integrates large-scale datasets, natural language processing, geospatial analysis, and fieldwork to analyze China’s presence abroad. His publications appear in journals such as Geopolitics, Eurasian Geography and Economics, and the Asian Journal of Law and Society. Alongside his academic research, he consults for international organizations and develops digital platforms and data infrastructures to map development projects and analyze global infrastructure networks. I will also present both the draft article and a previous work recently published in Geopolitics.