The global economy is shattered by imperialist wars in Ukraine and Iran. The forward march of right-wing reactionary forces and their dominant narratives is creating havoc in politics, society, culture and the economy in order to uphold the interests of a few capitalist classes. People are struggling in their everyday lives with the rising cost of living, but investors thought they had found a safe haven in the booming market of artificial intelligence (AI).
Despite geopolitical upheavals and business uncertainty, progress in AI has helped AI companies consolidate and mobilise investors to pour huge amounts of capital into the hope of quick profits. The reality is different. A debt trap hides behind the AI boom.
American AI companies are betting with investors’ money and spreading infantile, scaremongering propaganda that AI can kill all human beings. There is a method behind this useless and unfounded campaign. Doomsday propaganda is a strategic design to lower investors’ expectations of AI companies in the form of returns and profit.
AI as a knowledge tradition and as a skill set is going to grow, but profiteering by AI companies without weaponising it for the military-industrial complex—the source of super-profits for AI companies and their investors—is not going to grow. So there is a corporate assault on AI and its knowledge traditions by promoting false propaganda while weaponising AI to serve imperialist corporate capitalism under American hegemony.
American AI companies are leading the unfounded propaganda about different risks of AI, as if American companies had accidentally discovered humanity in their corporate designs and operations. In reality, this hides the failures of American AI companies to make AI more productive in terms of output, growth and profit.
Chinese AI companies, Chinese researchers and universities are not only advancing the frontiers of AI but also sharing their knowledge tradition with the world with the support of the state and government under the leadership of the Communist Party of China. Chinese AI companies are undeterred by American AI companies’ propaganda, which hides their debt trap in the name of the security of human life and livelihood.
The crisis of American AI companies is a product of speculative market valuation, which is always higher than real value creation, and of the high concentration of AI companies controlled by a few individuals and their investors, whereas Chinese AI companies are shaped, funded and secured by the Chinese state and government. American AI companies are facing market volatility due to “high valuation and projected outcome” and “high concentration of investment in a few large AI companies.” These conditions and combinations are a recipe for the current crisis and future disasters.
Instead of taking accountability, American corporate ruling classes continue to blame China’s transition from “imitation” to “innovation,” which causes a collapse-like situation for American AI companies. In reality, China is not only leading; it is a leader in the global tech industry, shaped by different frontiers of AI. Chinese skilled working people do not imitate; they develop new knowledge and innovate new technology, products and services for people and the sustainability of the planet.
DeepSeek is a classic example of the Chinese contribution to people in a world of AI corporatisation by American companies. It is not a capitalist illusion but the reality of Chinese technological growth and achievements that threaten the very foundation of profit-driven AI led by American corporations, which are facing an imminent debt trap and so escape responsibility by outsourcing the blame to automated AI agents that can kill human beings and destroy the planet. It is a joke written by infantile jokers of American capitalism to hide their failures. The American dream is a joke at which no one laughs now.
The major American AI companies, such as Microsoft, Alphabet, Amazon and Meta, are not only operating through venture capitalists but also spending investors’ money by borrowing from the open market, where small investors and individual savers are going to lose their hard-earned money. Companies like Microsoft, Alphabet and Meta are hiding their $3 trillion debt.
The combined debt of major American AI companies has soared to $1.65 trillion this year alone. Such a huge debt is a product of hyperscale betting on the AI boom, which poses an existential danger to American AI companies. Betting is an inherent business model within American capitalism that shapes AI business, whereas betting has been banned in China since the Communist Party of China came to power in 1949.
DeepSeek is funded by the National AI Industry Investment Fund of the Chinese state. For the first time, DeepSeek has raised private and external funding of nearly $7.4 billion this year by forming a limited partnership with investors. This is the fundamental difference between the business models of Chinese and American AI companies. Security of investment, growth and development define the operation of Chinese AI companies, whereas volatility is an everyday affair for American AI companies.
This is the context in which it is important to expose the fraudulent and strategic doomsday propaganda of American AI companies, which allows them to escape accountability for the profits they promised investors, and to understand available alternatives to expand the horizon of AI knowledge traditions free from venture capitalists and their AI weaponisation strategies of making profit at the cost of people. Chinese AI companies like DeepSeek show the way to do business while empowering people with the expansion of technological knowledge in everyday life.
Knowledge hoarding for profit concentration in capitalism breeds all forms of crisis. American AI companies are facing it and trying to escape the crisis of the debt trap with false propaganda, whereas DeepSeek continues to develop new frontiers of AI with a social commitment that sustains its business model. The debt trap of American AI companies and their business models breeds crisis and is an impediment to the growth of AI as a form of knowledge tradition and as a form of skill set for people.
Therefore, it is imperative to develop AI for the greater good of society by expanding human freedom, happiness, peace and prosperity beyond the logic of capitalism. The choice is clear: American panic-driven business versus Chinese progress for the people—progress led by AI and shaped by the Chinese people, their state and government under the leadership of the Communist Party of China.
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*Academic based in UK
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