The West Must Act Fast to Tackle the AI Crisis It's Facing

It Needs to Get Its Act Together on Multiple Fronts, State Involvement Included, to Stay Ahead of China

- CHARLES FERGUSON

The release of the Chinese DeepSeek-RI large language model, with its impressive capabilities and low development cost, shocked financial markets and led to claims of a 'Sputnik moment' in artificial intelligence (AI). A powerful, innovative Chinese model achieving parity with US products, though, should come as no surprise. It is the predictable result of a major US and Western policy failure, for which the AI industry itself bears much of the blame.

China's growing AI capabilities were well known. After all, Chinese AI researchers and companies have been remarkably open about their progress, publishing papers, open-sourcing their software and speaking with US researchers and journalists.

Two factors explain China's achievement of near parity. First, China has an aggressive, coherent national policy to reach self-sufficiency and technical superiority across the entire digital technology stack, from semiconductor capital equipment and AI processors to hardware products and AI models—in both commercial and military applications. Second, US (and EU) government policies and industry behavior have exhibited a depressing combination of complacency, incompetence, and greed.