China had a plan to flood the world with cheap manufactured wares made from slave labor and by ripping off intellectual property. It was a cunning industrial plan. One that harmed American blue-collar workers and lulled the world into dependence on cheap Chinese products. Now, China is seeking to achieve a similar goal with artificial intelligence: Create a low-cost product by hook or by crook, then lull other countries, including the United States, into dependence.
President Donald Trump has pledged to stop this penetration, and yet, as we shall see, the U.S. is deep in China’s coils. It will take yet more reforms to fully assert American independence, let alone dominance. Just last month, Chinese President Xi Jinping told his Politburo, “AI can become an international public good that benefits all humanity.” To anyone paying attention to actual Chinese policy and history, those phrases, “public good” and “benefits all humanity,” surely ring false.
But they ring “true” to DeepSeek, the hot new Chinese AI that has rapidly penetrated American life these past few months: It’s on smartphones, in cryptocurrency, and even in human resources. But DeepSeek is a sneaky double-dip: both a copycat and spyware.
In the words of a February report from the Center for Strategic and International Studies, “DeepSeek presents risks … to the United States’ partners and allies, as well as the tech industry.”
And just last month, the U.S. House Select Committee on Strategic Competition Between the United States and the Chinese Communist Party declared that “DeepSeek represents a profound threat to our nation’s security. Although it presents itself as just another AI chatbot, offering users a way to generate text and answer questions, closer inspection reveals that the app siphons data back to the People’s Republic of China, creates security vulnerabilities for its users, and relies on a model that covertly censors and manipulates information pursuant to Chinese law.”
To be sure, DeepSeek is hardly alone in the U.S. The best-known Chinese digital product is TikTok, which started out as a niche youth product and has now spread to more than half the nation. And while TikTok seems to many to be just fun dance videos, the reality is that on the back end, in Beijing, data-scourers are harvesting information not only on the video watcher but on everyone else in the watcher’s network.
Meanwhile, other Chinese companies, including Huawei and Alibaba, are debuting their AIs. In fact, China brags that it has built an AI “supermarket.” We should view all these “offerings” as so many Trojan horses. That is, a deal too good to be true: a trick to get inside our walls.
To use an analogy more specific to China, we can compare the process to the venerable Chinese strategy game of weiqi. It’s a game of patient positioning, in which the loser ends up surrounded — and disappears.
So what is the U.S. doing in response? The Trump administration has issued a number of executive orders on AI, but they are mostly focused on developing the U.S. industry, including its all-important energy supply. Yet U.S. leadership on AI means little if China can simply steal the tech, just as it has so many times in the past, including to make DeepSeek.
To be sure, some might think that none of these AI companies — American, Chinese, or other — are to be trusted. That is, they all intend to use our data for profit or to advance political goals, including wokeness.
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That’s a reasonable concern, and yet if the AI company is inside the U.S., there’s at least the hope that it can be made to obey American laws and the Constitution. So a true “America First” plan includes robust protection of behaving American AIs.
The manipulative tactics of Chinese heavy industry changed the world over the last 40 years. The same manipulation of AI could do the same in the next 40 years — or the next four years. We’ve been warned. The clock is ticking.
James P. Pinkerton is an author and political analyst who was a White House domestic policy aide to Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush.