Ramifications of China’s DeepSeek Moment, Part 2: AI, Cultural Values, and Global Freedom
Special Three-Part Series: Ramifications of China’s DeepSeek Moment. Read part I and part III.
Part 1 in this three-part series discussed some of the competitive and national-security ramifications of Chinese artificial intelligence (AI) innovator DeepSeek launching its powerful new R1 open-source AI model. In this second installment of the series, we discuss why, in this “DeepSeek moment,” it is essential for America to get AI policy right. This is not merely to boost global competitiveness and innovative outcomes, but also to ensure that other values our nation cherishes—pluralism, liberty, democracy, free speech, privacy, and civil rights—continue to thrive globally.
Stopping the spread of “digital authoritarianism” has been a long-standing bipartisan priority across parties and presidential administrations. As one Biden administration official testified at a Senate hearing in 2023, America needs to shape global technology markets “so that AI advances democratic values and human rights, protects our safety and security, and supports consumers and workers. When the United States pulls back, our adversaries and competitors fill the void.”
It has become clear that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is taking steps to export its own values of control, surveillance, and censorship to boost its geopolitical influence and that of other autocratic regimes. This poses a threat to global order, freedom, privacy, and human rights. It is why some analysts argue that Chinese supremacy in AI is “potentially more catastrophic for human freedom than anything dreamed up by science fiction” and that “[t]he fate of societies and economies founded on Western liberal principles hangs in the balance—a future that Beijing and the Chinese Communist Party want to replace with their own totalitarian template.”
Policymakers must take these considerations seriously as they look to formulate policy in the race for global AI leadership.
Lessons from the Analog Age
A nation’s technological vitality has broad social and cultural ramifications, both domestically and globally. Consider an analog age example: the American entertainment industry. While some might decry the American entertainment industry’s outsized influence on global culture, it actually had important advantages for the United States in terms of spreading American values far and wide. It is impossible to measure how much influence American entertainment has had over time on foreign cultures—and there certainly have been some downsides to it. Nonetheless, the world is better off today because the American information industries dominated over propaganda-laced communications and censored media from autocratic nations.
Consider, for example, how global norms and freedoms might have been negatively shaped had the Soviet Union’s information controls extended well beyond Soviet Bloc countries. If the entire European continent had been trapped under the same informational control regime, or if those authoritarian approaches and values had dominated entire other continents across the globe, the world would have been worse off for it.
This same danger exists today, but the ramifications could be even more profound with America’s leading nondemocratic adversary now being a more technologically sophisticated country like China, which is actively seeking both to be the global leader in AI, robotics, and autonomous systems and spread its values through those systems to other nations to counter Western values.
How China Spreads Digital Authoritarianism
As three former national security officials noted last year, American principles and values “stand in sharp contrast to rival foreign organizations which are oftentimes state run and act as an extension of their authoritarian governments.” This is particularly true of Chinese companies. For example, DeepSeek’s R1 reflects Chinese values, and censorship is embedded by design. R1 is actively censored to exclude communications that would run afoul of CCP directives, which DeepSeek must do to gain favor with the CCP and become a so-called “national champion.”
This should be one of America’s great advantages in the race for global communications technology influence. U.S.-based technology firms enjoy the benefits of constitutionally protected free speech rights and a more culturally pluralistic amalgamation of viewpoints and expression. By contrast, the CCP demands that Chinese tech companies fall in line with various party priorities, which limit those things.
Unfortunately, that does not necessarily mean U.S. firms or values will win out globally in the fight against the sort of digital authoritarianism being pushed by nations like Russia and China. The Chinese government in particular is working actively to shape global markets and cultural norms more to their favor through a process some scholars refer to as “weaponized interdependence,” in which some powerful nations use global networks and investments as leverage to influence other countries.
For example, China has been expanding its Digital Silk Road effort, which is part of its Belt and Road Initiative. These are major Chinese global initiatives intended to spread CCP influence through investment assistance for nations with basic infrastructure needs. Atlantic Council scholars explain how the goal of the Digital Silk Road initiative is to “shape the global AI ecosystem according to [China’s] own terms, which risks undermining international norms and values on privacy, transparency, and accountability.”
These Chinese efforts have made significant inroads, particularly in the Global South, through major investments in various telecommunications systems and digital technologies. With many countries looking to accelerate their information and communication technology capabilities, cheap Chinese hardware and software is seductive. American firms and interests are challenged by these developments. “Without a clear, viable model of digital governance to oppose digital authoritarianism, the United States stands to lose political influence over a number of countries in these areas,” one New America Foundation scholar notes.
Western Nations Have the Wrong Focus in International Negotiations
Many Western pundits and politicians are ignoring this problem and instead focusing on formulating global “AI safety” treaties that would only tie the hands of Western nations while China and other countries race ahead. Some scholars call for sweeping global computational control mechanisms to address AI risks, including new global regulatory control bodies that would limit the development of more sophisticated frontier AI models in America. Some of these proposals may be debated at the “AI Action Summit” taking place in Paris next week, which Vice President JD Vance will be attending.
Today’s global AI safety negotiations embody some of the same sort of idealistic Cold War-era thinking about how to address the dangers of previous dual-use technologies. In 1972, the United Nation’s 1972 Biological Weapons Convention (BWC) looked to ban biological and toxic weapons globally. While well-intentioned, cheating was rampant: While the former Soviet Union signed the BWC, it ignored it and instead secretly developed biological weapons on a massive scale.
In a similar way, the danger exists today that China will continue to rapidly accelerate both its own internal AI and robotic capabilities, while at the same time hoodwinking the rest of the world when it comes to global AI safety promises.
If it is the case, as one leading commentator writes, that “China, Russia, and many other rival nations have no such plans” to stop the development of their own advanced AI systems, then the “U.S. has no real choice other than to try to stay ahead of them.” China recently refused to sign on to a nonbinding blueprint that emerged from an international conference on “Responsible Artificial Intelligence in the Military Domain.” But even if the CCP were to sign on to any global AI accords, there is little reason to trust that they would live up to any promises made.
Meanwhile, many foreign nations—including some in Europe—are looking to impose speech-related restrictions on AI systems. These new information-control efforts increasingly come into conflict with the First Amendment rights of Americans. “We are on the threshold of a revolution in the creation and discovery of knowledge,” argues the President and Chief Executive Officer of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression. Unfortunately, free speech and free inquiry are at risk in the AI age due to “regulatory overreach that limits its potential as a tool for contributing to human knowledge,” he notes.
Conclusion
Ultimately, America must lead in global AI markets, even if it ends up being the case that “every country is on its own on AI,” as two Center for a New American Security scholars conclude of the current situation. At some point, as previous R Street research has argued, “the ‘realpolitik’ of international AI governance demands that U.S. officials prioritize not only our national security but also the liberal values that will help ensure broad-based human flourishing along multiple dimensions.”
Part 3 in this series will take a closer look at some of the ramifications of the DeepSeek moment for the broader politics of AI. It will also outline some specific AI policy priorities for U.S. legislators that both parties should hopefully be able to agree on.