DeepSeek announced it intends to build artificial general intelligence and doubled as a recruiting pitch: the company plans to double in size, and more than 10,000 resumes arrived within a day. That is how a company hires when its government treats AI as a national security imperative. I argue in The National Interest that the United States should treat it as one of ours.
DeepSeek was built with private money, but China’s 2017 National Intelligence Law compels every firm to cooperate with state intelligence work, and in the company’s first outside raise, the state-backed National AI Industry Investment Fund took the only voting rights. Beijing has set dates: lead the world in AI by 2030, a fully AI-integrated economy by 2035. America has yet to answer with its own.
Washington has the right instincts on offense. Stargate aims to put up to $500 billion of private capital behind American data centers, and the Export-Import Bank’s American AI Exports Program finances allied purchases of trusted American AI. Every foreign customer on the American stack is one that is not on Beijing’s.
The subtlest threat comes from Congress. The Remote Access Security Act is meant to stop China from renting American computing power through the cloud to evade chip export controls. Its objective is sound, but the bill hands the executive branch a broad licensing authority over who may access American compute from abroad, aimed at no one in particular and available to whoever runs the Commerce Department. Allied companies will notice. At the moment the United States should be expanding its share of the global AI market, Congress should not make American cloud services harder to buy than China’s.
Every AI policy should be judged by one question: does it strengthen America’s position or China’s? The country that wins will be the one the rest of the world still chooses to build on, invest in, and buy from.
Read the full piece: China Is Recruiting for the AI Race. America Must Respond. (The National Interest, July 22, 2026)