Doug Kelly, CEO of American Edge Project
In Silicon Valley’s hyper-competitive marketplace, tech giants wage daily battles for talent, market share, and innovation supremacy. Yet when America’s national security hangs in the balance, these same companies demonstrate an extraordinary willingness to unite in defense of our democratic values and technological global leadership.
This week’s announcement from Meta perfectly illustrates this distinctly American dynamic. By making Llama, its powerful open-source artificial intelligence (AI) model, available to U.S. government agencies working on defense and national security applications, and simultaneously forging partnerships with industry leaders, such as Microsoft, AWS, IBM, Lockheed Martin and Palantir, Meta shows how competitors can become strategic allies in service of national interests.
Such unity comes at a pivotal moment in the high-stakes tech race with China. In this race, the winner will determine the values – democratic or autocratic – that will guide the standards and the future of global technology. Beijing knows this and is executing an aggressive three-part strategy to displace American tech leadership: pouring $1.4 trillion into strategic technologies, orchestrating the theft of roughly $500 billion annually in American intellectual property and trade secrets, and methodically making the world dependent on Chinese technology for geopolitical leverage.
China’s creation of OpenAtom represents perhaps the most sophisticated element of this strategy. This state-backed open-source ecosystem isn’t just about software development – it’s a collaboration with China’s largest tech companies to create a trojan horse designed to embed their core values into global technology infrastructure. By promoting Chinese technical standards internationally, while making their technology both accessible and essential, Beijing seeks to reshape the digital world in its authoritarian image.
The strategy is already bearing fruit. Chinese AI models are now challenging American ones for technical predominance, according to MIT Technology Review. More alarming still, one Chinese tech firm is flooding global markets with more than 100 open-source AI models in dozens of languages, strategically targeting countries in the Global South and price-sensitive companies in Europe, 16 percent of which said they would switch to Chinese-made technology if the price of American technology jumped because of excessive regulations.
As China promotes its vision of authoritarian AI, the United States must accelerate AI innovation to lead in all approaches and models. This will ensure the world’s technological future is American-made and underpinned by the values of freedom, democracy, and opportunity.
If the United States restricts open-source AI development for example, we risk ceding a crucial battlefield to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Beijing’s strategy of technological influence through open-source platforms resonates particularly in developing markets, where cost considerations often outweigh security concerns. The consequences of retreat would be profound: every piece of Chinese technology that enters these markets becomes a potential vector for surveillance, control and authoritarian influence.
This week’s display of America public- and private-sector unity points the way forward. But to truly win the tech race with China, the United States can’t just win on one battleground – we need to win every one of them. This means policymakers, working with the private sector, must develop developing a comprehensive strategy to:
- Establish democratic standards for global technology before China’s authoritarian alternatives take root.
- Accelerate innovation through deeper public-private collaborations, regulatory reform, and policies that unleash our private sector muscle, not handcuff it.
- Develop the necessary world-class technical talent needed in the short- and long-term though investments in education, trade schools, worker retraining, and ensuring that foreign students educated here can stay in the country after graduating in a science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) field.
- Strengthen technological alliances with Western partners to present a united front against China’s ambitions.
- Lead the world in a range of AI approaches, including both closed-source and open-source AI models, to accelerate the adoption of American AI.
- Engage in proactive “digital diplomacy“ with the Global South, with U.S. agencies and American tech companies working together to support these countries’ digital efforts.
- Aggressively counter digital authoritarianism by ensuring an open and accessible internet, and the free flow of data between countries.
The technological race with China transcends market competition – it’s a contest between democratic values and authoritarian control in the digital age. Domestic initiatives, such as Meta’s, in partnership with key government agencies, and America’s leading technology and defense companies, demonstrates that when our fundamental values are at stake, the marketplace can meet the challenge with fierce competitors becoming powerful allies. In this existential competition between liberty and autocracy, there’s no room for half measures. For the sake of our country, our alliances and the globe good overall, the global tech future must be American made.