DeepSeek chaos shows ‘America First’ doesn’t always win. It may embolden Trump anyway

The stunning rise of DeepSeek is sending shockwaves through the artificial intelligence world, threatening America’s dominance that seemed set in stone just a week ago.

The stunning rise of DeepSeek is sending shockwaves through the artificial intelligence world, threatening America’s dominance that seemed set in stone just a week ago. The fact that a little-known Chinese startup has built a model that can compete with leading US AI systems is challenging the conventional wisdom that it takes gobs of money and unlimited access to cutting-edge computer chips to train AI technology. It shouldn’t really be possible for a Chinese AI startup to go toe-to-toe with OpenAI’s GPT-4o and Google’s Gemini. Now, President Donald Trump has to decide how to respond. The United States has imposed tough restrictions that are designed to prevent Chinese firms from buying or building their own cutting-edge computer chips required to train AI models. These chips are at the heart of the AI arms race and the goal of the export curbs is to prevent China from keeping up. Some have argued that DeepSeek’s success – it claims to have trained its new AI model R1 at a fraction of the cost and on far fewer high-end chips than leading AI models – shows the Biden and first Trump administration’s export curbs have backfired: These tough restrictions may have backed Beijing into a corner, forcing Chinese firms to come up with ways to innovate around the exports or build their own chips. “Rather than impeding China, these AI export controls may be accelerating China’s AI capacity by pushing them to innovate,” John Villasenor, a professor of engineering and law at UCLA, told CNN in a phone interview. “The export controls, arguably, are counterproductive.”