What feels especially frightening is the way a political agenda is being blended into personal lifestyle- the argument that “if you are a good citizen, you should support AI.” The analysis of Palantir’s use of the China threat narrative as a way to avoid or weaken regulation was particularly interesting.
When a campaign spreads fear by saying, “China will take our data and steal our jobs,” what it ultimately means is that these companies want more investment to flow toward themselves and toward American AI companies.
What is the most frightening power of the media? It is Agendasetting. Right now, parts of the American media ecosystem are selling a political narrative: national security and technological supremacy.
As far as I know, Super PAC funding can at least be tracked to some extent. But money flowing to individual influencers is much harder to regulate. That is where the problem appears. As the influence of legacy media declines, the influence and voice of individual influencers so called new media. become stronger. Public opinion can be shaped there as well. American AI companies are investing in this regulatory blind spot and using it to push regulation in a direction favorable to themselves.
The new exercise of power through money and technology is frightening. But the most frightening part, for me, lies elsewhere.
As someone from Korea — a third country that is neither the United States nor China — the fundamental issue I feel is that most of the American AI ecosystem is closed. Gemini, GPT, and Claude are subscription/API-based products, and their pricing and access conditions can change.
If such changes happen, developers who want to escape vendor lock-in may start looking toward domestic models. And right now, Chinese open-weight models such as Qwen and DeepSeek already exert a very strong influence on those domestic model ecosystems. The United States is still centered around the CUDA ecosystem, but China already has its own CANN ecosystem.
Outside Silicon Valley, the logical ecosystem of models that individuals can actually download, run, modify, and build upon may increasingly be shaped by China. Closed American models may still retain an advantage at the technological frontier, but open Chinese models can serve as a baseline price-resistance layer. If American companies try to raise prices too aggressively, strong Chinese open models can limit how far those price increases can go.
The Linux server case feels similar.
One reason data centers chose Linux was exactly this: at server scale, licensing costs, deployment control, automation, customization, and avoiding vendor lock-in matter. Windows Server still played an important role when vendor accountability, compatibility, or specific enterprise software mattered. But at large infrastructure scale, open systems largely won.
A similar phenomenon may occur in artificial intelligence.
Open local models do not necessarily need to be the best. If they are good enough, cheap, easy to deploy, and free from unstable vendor pricing, they can become a core part of the infrastructure layer.
If that happens, what will become of American developers? Will they start thinking in a Chinese programming style?
Right now, I read both Chinese and American programming sites. At the moment, I still mostly follow American open-source communities. But in the future, I may need to pay more attention to Chinese sites. Perhaps this is the time to start studying Chinese.
