The West must act fast to tackle the AI crisis it's facing

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).

- CHARLES FERGUSON

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 behaviour have exhibited a depressing combination of complacency, incompetence and greed.

It should be obvious that Chinese President Xi Jinping and Russian President Vladimir Putin are no friends of the West, and that AI will drive enormously consequential economic and military transformations.

Given the stakes involved, maintaining AI leadership within democratic advanced economies justifies-and even demands-an enormous public-private strategic mobilization on the scale of the Manhattan Project, Nato, various energy-independence efforts or nuclear-weapons policies.