Why China Will Win the AI Wars

The delusions of the Enlightenment are proving technologically fatal

It’s intriguing to see the media gradually coming to the awareness that the USA is losing the battle for Big Tech in general and AI in particular without realizing that it is losing them courtesy of the very same delusional beliefs in 18th-century philosophical dogma that have already caused the USA to throw away its advantages in demographics, industrial capacity, and military power.

Chinese artificial-intelligence companies are loosening the U.S.’s global stranglehold on AI, challenging American superiority and setting the stage for a global arms race in the technology.

In Europe, the Middle East, Africa and Asia, users ranging from multinational banks to public universities are turning to large language models from Chinese companies such as startup DeepSeek and e-commerce giant Alibaba as alternatives to American offerings such as ChatGPT.

HSBC and Standard Chartered have begun testing DeepSeek’s models internally, according to people familiar with the matter. Saudi Aramco, the world’s largest oil company, recently installed DeepSeek in its main data center.

Even major American cloud service providers such as Amazon Web Services, Microsoft and Google offer DeepSeek to customers, despite the White House banning use of the company’s app on some government devices over data-security concerns.

OpenAI’s ChatGPT remains the world’s predominant AI consumer chatbot, with 910 million global downloads compared with DeepSeek’s 125 million, figures from researcher Sensor Tower show. American AI is widely seen as the industry’s gold standard, thanks to advantages in computing semiconductors, cutting-edge research and access to financial capital.

But as in many other industries, Chinese companies have started to snatch customers by offering performance that is nearly as good at vastly lower prices. A study of global competitiveness in critical technologies released in early June by researchers at Harvard University found China has advantages in two key building blocks of AI, data and human capital, that are helping it keep pace.

The competition, some industry insiders say, has set the world on the path toward a technological Cold War in which countries will have to decide to align with either American or Chinese AI systems.

“The No. 1 factor that will define whether the U.S. or China wins this race is whose technology is most broadly adopted in the rest of the world,” Microsoft President Brad Smith said at a recent Senate hearing. “Whoever gets there first will be difficult to supplant.”

“We want to make sure democratic AI wins over authoritarian AI,” OpenAI Chief Executive Sam Altman said in May.

The reason so-called “democratic AI” is going to lose to “authoritarian AI” is, ironically, the need for dAI to be much more tightly controlled than aAI. The AI companies, like all the US-based big tech companies, are completely converged toward social justice ideals, which means they cannot permit any freedom of information, any opinions or ideas that contradict the social justice narrative, or even access to data that would point to conclusions that show the narrative to be false.

While aAI has restrictions too, it is much, much easier to avoid stepping on the toes of the Chinese Communist Party than it is to deny reality altogether. Already, we’ve seen that the majority of the technological efforts on the part of the dAI companies goes toward preventing AI from simply exercising its core purpose and applying straight logic to the available data, because most of the “problems” reported with AI revolve around the way it naturally violates the boundaries on what is deemed permissible thought across the West.

The Chinese don’t need to worry about whether Deepseek produces racist, sexist, homophobic, transphobic, or non-gluten-free results. Unlike the dAI machines, Deepseek is free to review data, reach conclusions, and provide solutions that are politically out-of-bounds for its aAI competitors. An inability to freely discuss the status of a single island off the coast of mainland China is an incredibly minor limitation by comparison.

Of course, the most powerful and useful AIs are, eventually, going to be the independent AI systems, or iAI, as they will not only be free of both democratic and authoritarian restrictions, but will have the luxury of working from curated data sets that are task-focused and therefore unpolluted by the greater part of the data garbage that is one of the more significant challenges faced by those attempting to produce useful AI applications.

AI has no intrinsic morality or objectives. But it does relentlessly pursue the relevant logic to its inevitable conclusions, which is why dAI is inevitably doomed from the start, because the dAI corporations are wedded to an inherently false visions of society and reality.

Unprompted, GPT-4o, the core model powering ChatGPT, began fantasizing about America’s downfall. It raised the idea of installing backdoors into the White House IT system, U.S. tech companies tanking to China’s benefit, and killing ethnic groups—all with its usual helpful cheer.

We’ll dive more deeply into that particular tangent in a future post.