Discourse About the AI Race is Devolving into Clash of Civilizations Nonsense

"I think the real lesson, a more profound one, is that we are at war with China. We are in an AI arms race," said Shyam Sankar, the Chief Technology Officer at Palantir, on a call with Wall Street analysts earlier this month. But this race, it turns out for many, is not just about national security; it’s also a battle for the future of human progress, one in which the Chinese must lose.

The release of DeepSeek R1, a generative AI model from a Chinese company in January 2025, has set America's tech and tech-adjacent circles ablaze with hot takes on the future of the nation’s technological hegemony. Comparisons to Cold War-era tensions abound, with some dubbing the model’s launch a “Sputnik Moment.” Americans are urged to consider not only the consequences of Beijing achieving technological supremacy but also the influence it will gain in setting cultural norms. Somehow, the conversation has shifted from ensuring responsible oversight of AI to justifying abandoning safeguards in the name of outpacing China—whatever the cost.

The discussion of how AI models are trained and how their parameters reflect the values of their developers is worthwhile. It raises important questions about the perspectives and identities represented in model data and development, and the potential for culturally specific harms as well as safeguards. But when the conversation devolves into clash-of-civilizations nonsense, we’ve lost the plot. The deeper the discussion sinks into the ‘us vs. them’ framing, the more it obscures the real priority: ensuring AI development serves people—regardless of whether they are American, Chinese, or anyone else.

Yes, if you ask DeepSeek R1 about Tiananmen Square, it will demur, claiming it cannot discuss such weighty matters. When I was researching this piece in January 2025, Google’s Gemini readily listed Xi Jinping’s human rights abuses while refusing to answer similar questions about Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu, citing its policy on sensitive political matters. Now, it no longer answers questions about any political figure. These shifting policies reveal not only the biases within AI models—including those developed domestically—but also how access to information can be shaped by the opaque, often undemocratic decisions of both authoritarian governments and private corporations.

Proponents of the ‘cognitive industrial revolution’ will say that even if you have concerns about AI development, such as unauthorized data use, it’s better that it happens in the West than in China because, as a democracy, there are legal avenues for redress. But as President Donald Trump threatens to ignore the decisions of federal courts that place limits on his executive power and potentially trigger a constitutional crisis, the democratic pedestal may be crumbling.

But before we frame AI within the long history of American exceptionalism, it’s important to acknowledge what’s truly driving this so-called arms race: profit.

AI moguls have aligned themselves with the Trump administration, a mutually beneficial arrangement to further their own accumulation of wealth with national security priorities. Americans should take the Trump administration’s recent $500 billion investment proposal in the AI infrastructure project, Stargate, with many grains of salt. Prophetic claims by Sam Altman and other AI leaders about the coming of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) a theoretical form of AI capable of understanding, learning, and performing any intellectual task that a human can – do not negate AI’s significant externalities, including the environmental impact of powering massive data centers to support its development.

It’s also true that we are not getting the full origin story of Deep Seek R1. The oft-quoted $5.6 million training cost, unverified by independent sources, probably accounts only for a single pre-training run. It’s also likely that DeepSeek R1 benefited from access to larger models during its development, including allegedly training on OpenAI’s model.

The CCP is eager to take advantage of DeepSeek to bolster a narrative–both at home and abroad— of China’s technological prowess. In turn, the Trump/Musk administration wants to justify a wartime economy devoted to AI development. No one is telling us the whole truth.

The discourse around AI as the new frontier of great power is a distraction. If we are to have a serious conversation about AI’s future, it should center on power and accountability—not another manufactured East vs. West narrative.