China tests US hegemony

Global media raced to cover last week’s most prominent digital event: China’s surprise generative model, DeepSeek, which competes with ChatGPT and Gemini. The astonishment was not only in the model’s linguistic and analytical capabilities but also in its development cost, reportedly under $6 million while American models have cost hundreds of billions. This discrepancy has unsettled American tech giants such as Google, Microsoft, and OpenAI, whose market values have taken a hit and incurred heavy losses, provoking a strong reaction from the US government. The US President expressed his discontent and escalated threats toward China, viewing its rapid digital incursion as an existential challenge to American technological, economic, and military hegemony. The crisis has evolved beyond mere discontent or fear. It has reached the point of questioning the integrity of the Chinese company behind DeepSeek typical of every economic and industrial battle with China. For example, OpenAI has directly accused the Chinese firm of, as yet unproven, exploiting data from OpenAI (which is used to train ChatGPT) for its own model, DeepSeek, and even of using OpenAI’s training methodology according to a BBC investigation. OpenAI’s claim is based on the principle that it is nearly impossible to achieve high performance on a large dataset at such a low cost, casting doubt on how the Chinese model could attain competitive capabilities compared to its American counterparts. Amid this digital confrontation between China and the US, the US President, despite his concerns believed that this new Chinese technological edge and rapid digital expansion should serve as a wake-up call for the American tech sector. This sentiment recalls long-standing American fears when facing major rivals, such as the decline in US educational standards during the 1980s, which led to the famous “A Nation at Risk” report during the Cold War with the Soviet Union.

Beyond the usual controversies, the media coverage, especially from US outlets tends to exaggerate, reflecting longstanding anxieties about the “Chinese dragon.” American experts have previously warned about the dangers of Chinese encroachment across all industrial sectors, foreseeing a scenario in which China could devour American industry, crush its economy, and ultimately reverse global power balances to become the world’s strongest nation. Thus, the American media’s enthusiasm over the Chinese generative model is merely part of an anti-Chinese-growth narrative. In my own experience, I found that while the Chinese model demonstrates high linguistic and analytical proficiency, its current performance does not render it decisively superior to the paid version of ChatGPT, although a fair comparison shows the free Chinese model outperforming its free American counterpart.

I view the US–China conflict over the emergence of the Chinese generative model as one rooted in political and economic competition — a race for digital hegemony that now forms the backbone of the global economy. We are living in a digital age where artificial intelligence and its astonishing models dominate both economic and military supremacy. Recent reports of an occupying entity’s use of AI-powered, unprecedented weapons of mass destruction in conflict zones underscore this transformation. We must recognise that we have entered a digital era where diverse digital industries are rising, affecting our daily lives. It is misleading, as the American and Western media would have us believe, to confine digital systems and AI solely to generative models like ChatGPT and DeepSeek. In reality, there are intelligent systems powered by AI algorithms that offer far greater value to developers and decision-makers in major powers such as the US and China, addressing critical industrial, economic, and military interests. While the outputs of these systems often reach us in obscure forms, they could manifest as rapidly spreading, highly lethal biological warfare or as tiny “nano” military robots capable of infiltrating our bodies. Thus, the US–China conflict is not solely about the debut of a Chinese generative model; it is a deeper struggle reflecting the broader race for digital dominance. Scientific forecasts, whose precision appears only in rigorous academic publications, suggest that the contest between these nations extends well beyond the development of generative models. The digital race now encompasses advanced military technology, including smart weapons, biological arms, and space-based military innovations. The real struggle is one of existential significance, one that is steering the entire world toward the creation of a new global order that may ultimately be defined by Chinese leadership, whether sooner or later.

The writer is an academic and researcher