(TNND) — China’s DeepSeek artificial intelligence chatbot is making waves in the U.S. and stoking an already intense technology competition with America’s adversary.
“The release of DeepSeek AI from a Chinese company should be a wake-up call for our industries that we need to be laser-focused on competing to win, because we have the greatest scientists in the world,” President Donald Trump said this week.
DeepSeek released an AI assistant that rivals U.S.-based ChatGPT but reportedly with cost and efficiency gains.
“It’s definitely an arms race of sorts,” AI expert Anton Dahbura said Friday.
Dahbura, the co-director of the Johns Hopkins Institute for Assured Autonomy, said there’s “a lot of really good work going on in Europe, in Japan and elsewhere,” but the U.S. has a key adversarial relationship with China when it comes to AI development.
The competition has important implications for both our economy and national security.
“Because AI can be transformative,” Dahbura said.
The rapidly evolving world of AI is fueling developments in both hardware and software, which have economic implications.
And there are security implications for AI, which either country could use to bolster cyberattacks or reinforce defenses of information systems.
With so much at stake, the U.S. might want to foster AI cooperation with China, another expert wrote.
Karson Elmgren, a technology and security policy fellow at RAND, said the U.S. cooperated with the Soviet Union during the Cold War on technology to ensure control over nuclear weapons.
The U.S. “may again wish to keep its competitors safer to assure its own safety,” Elmgren said.
But, he wrote, ” … Care must be taken to make sure that in helping make Chinese AI safer, the United States does not also help it advance its AI capabilities. For this purpose, the safer bet may be avoiding cooperation on technical matters and focusing instead on topics such as risk management protocols or incident reporting.”
Another RAND expert, associate information scientist Lennart Heim, wrote that DeepSeek’s performance and efficiency gains deserve recognition. But they shouldn’t mislead us into thinking that U.S. export restrictions on AI chips aren’t working to give American companies the upper hand, he said.
“Controls buy valuable time, but they need to be complemented with policies that ensure democracies stay in the lead and are resilient to adversaries,” Heim wrote.
Dahbura said, “Creative ideas for mutual cooperation are always welcomed in my book.”
But he said U.S.-China cooperation on AI is challenging.
Both sides would have to play by the rules.
“And it’s not clear that that the level of trust is there yet,” he said.
China would have more to gain from any form of cooperation, Dahbura said.
“The best strategy for the U.S. is we just keep our head down, keep doing what we’re doing, investing in AI across the board, including research, and do what we’ve always done,” Dahbura said, “which is, when we focus on a challenge, we’re pretty good at it.”
DeepSeek’s emergence is just the “tip of the iceberg,” Dahbura said.
Expect more players on the AI scene as the technology matures.
And expect the cost and efficiency gains to come as a natural progression of the technology.
Is DeepSeek a threat to American companies?
“My colleagues and I don’t see that,” Dahbura said.