Can China dominate AI exports, too? Robotaxis offer an early test
When driverless taxis start cruising the cantons(行政区，州) of eastern Switzerland early next year, the invisible driver will be Chinese. PostBus, a Swiss public-transport company, has teamed up with Apollo Go, a robotaxi operator owned by Baidu, a Chinese tech giant. The project is one of dozens that have popped up over the past two years where the passengers are Singaporean, Slovakian or Saudi, but the hardware and data behind the steering wheel come from China.
China’s physical artificial-intelligence firms are racing overseas. More than 70 of them have set up operations abroad and another 20 or so are preparing to, according to EqualOcean, a Chinese research firm. Many, such as Neolix, an autonomous logistics group, are already operating in dozens of countries. They are leaving their American rivals in the dust when it comes to foreign expansion. Companies such as Waymo, an autonomous-cab firm owned by Alphabet, focused on cracking the domestic market and are just starting to roll into other countries.
The Chinese firms are eager to export partly because pickings at home are slim（国内可获得的商业回报有限）. In China they have been able to scale up their projects and bring down the unit cost of pricey hardware. Taxi companies have also been able to collect real-time data to make cabs run smoothly. But the economics still do not work, mainly because a glut(过量供应) of cab drivers is keeping fares low. Newly jobless workers often become cabbies(计程车司机), adding to supply. Baidu, which in 2025 said its robotaxis in the central city of Wuhan had broken even（实现盈亏平衡）, has not bragged about them since. Pony.ai, a rival, claims it has broken even in Chinese cities.
Foreign markets look far more appealing, especially if developers can deploy their low-cost technology and data from China in places where they can charge more. A ten-kilometre taxi ride in Wuhan costs around 23 yuan ($3.40), whereas the fare in St Gallen, a canton in eastern Switzerland, is a juicy SFr44 ($54). Such arbitrage probably explains why Chinese companies are now more focused on expanding abroad than on operations at home. Baidu no longer releases updates on its Chinese fleets and provides information only on its foreign ventures.
Purveyors(承办商) of AI services other than cabs also struggle to make a profit at home. Whereas some Westerners fork out for（支付一笔不菲费用购买） subscriptions to ChatGPT or Claude, Chinese consumers are unwilling to pay for their chatbots. Chinese businesses too are notoriously tight-fisted with their IT budgets, spending less than a tenth of what their American counterparts do.
文章将国内市场的难题概括为“低价格、低付费意愿与高供给”。国内规模化部署确实有助于压低单位成本，但当运价和软件订阅价格被竞争压低时，成本优势未必能够转化为利润。海外市场较高的价格为商业化提供了空间，但单次车费的差异并不能直接代表盈利能力；当地的合规、保险、地图、维护和运营成本仍可能削弱这种价格套利。
The Chinese government is also eager for more AI exports. But the stability-obsessed Communist Party wants to avoid any hint that AI is displacing jobs, and thus the risk of social unrest, while closing the gap with America in the AI race. Both AI service-providers and their customers may fear legal repercussions(坏的影响，后果) if job losses are perceived to be linked to AI. While Western companies brag to investors about supposed (and so far exaggerated) payroll savings（人力成本节省） from AI, Chinese firms are keeping quiet. Insiders say that some technology firms are indeed trimming the ranks of（缩减人员规模） their programmers—first in the firing line as coding tools advance rapidly—but are careful not to advertise it.
The deployment of robotaxis in China has not yet cost jobs, but even the suggestion of replacing cabbies with bots has led to small protests. Some local regulators have stopped issuing licences for self-driving fleets. In April a court ruled in favour of a worker who had sued his employer for losing his job to AI. A national oversight committee has also said that companies should not use the technology with the aim of replacing humans.
这一部分揭示了 AI 扩张中的政策约束。技术效率的提高并不自动意味着企业可以公开将其表述为“减少用工”的工具；在就业吸纳能力较弱、劳动者转岗成本较高的环境中，自动化带来的分配影响会迅速成为社会治理议题。个别诉讼和抗议并不能证明 AI 已在宏观层面大规模替代就业，但它们说明了技术部署的社会接受度会影响商业模式的推进速度。
AI-service exports are becoming the primary channel through which China can externalise the economic and social costs of the rapid expansion of the technology within the country, notes Angela Zhang of the University of Southern California. Like Chinese goods, AI services may face resistance abroad. They are more complex than merchandise, given regulatory and compliance risks associated with them, as Liu Qingfeng, the chairman of iFlyTech, a Chinese AI darling, recently observed. But unlike China, many Western markets are short of native workers; many cab drivers, say, are immigrants. In such cases Chinese services might even be welcomed.
Exporting AI services thus kills two birds with one stone（实现一举两得）: companies make money; the party is spared discontent. Perhaps even three: a focus on foreign markets allows China to preserve its export-led growth model even as the rest of the world becomes saturated(浸透) with its goods and many countries erect trade barriers. Overall service exports doubled to $510bn a year between 2015 and 2025, after adjusting for inflation, while (far larger) goods exports rose by a bit more than 40%. AI, in the form of cabs, cloud computing and chatbots, will make up a growing share of this expanding service trade.
劳动力短缺可能提高当地对自动化服务的接受度，但进口自动驾驶出租车同样可能触发监管审查或行业保护，因此服务出口通常比一般商品出口更依赖本地制度环境。
China could plausibly eventually lead the world in exports embodying AI. Along with the services themselves it is also exporting the industry’s technological standards, or widely accepted protocols for making everything from screws to semiconductors work together. For decades tech standards have normally been set by Western countries. But in many places they do not exist for AI services such as robotaxis. When Chinese companies are the first to establish robotaxis in a country they also become the de facto standards（事实标准，未必由正式机构制定但被市场广泛采用）, points out Ms Zhang. As their American counterparts seek to export more of their own bots, they may find they must make them more Chinese to fit in.
