For the U.S. to reclaim tech supremacy, it must embrace decentralization and open source AI
America has always been a land of opportunity for entrepreneurs, leading the planet in industrial and technological revolutions. Yet, for the past decade, America has gone to war with its own innovation sector. Even as the country’s politicians stated they would take on the unhealthy dominance of Big Tech companies, they inexplicably froze out the entrepreneurs best positioned to counteract that dominance: the developers building decentralized alternatives with blockchain and open[1] AI technology.
Instead of nurturing innovation to empower individuals and redistribute power away from Big Tech companies, regulators and policymakers have failed to embrace the distinct edge – its technological heritage, dynamism, and ingenuity – that makes America unique. For almost a decade, both Republican and Democrat administrations allowed the SEC and other regulators to manage the crypto sector by enforcement actions instead of rulemaking, while also smearing many legitimate American entrepreneurs as money launderers or drug traffickers.
On the AI front, the Biden administration told American investors the sector would soon be under government control, and hastily pushed out executive orders limiting computational power. This served, once again, to stifle innovation and enrich large companies. Democratic Party leaders also quietly deployed agencies to debank hundreds of founders in blockchain, artificial intelligence and and other tech fields—a sequence of events known as Operation Chokepoint 2.0.
Ironically, the upshot of this flurry of hostile actions has been to further entrench the five biggest tech corporations as gatekeepers of the Web, and swell to a combined market value of more than $10 trillion. Now, as the latest shockwave in AI and crashing stock markets demonstrate: America’s punitive and self-defeating stance on frontier technology is backfiring in real time.
The recent arrival of DeepSeek—an open-source AI model fully developed in China – has shaken the comforting narrative that U.S. companies clearly held the upper hand in AI. Now, DeepSeek’s shocking accomplishments have upended the assumption that America can win the AI game by throwing all of the country’s resources behind a handful of compute-rich, data-wielding tech giants. It turns out it was naive to assume Big Tech will always have better AI models than its open-source counterparts, and that only a small number of monolithic, proprietary models will win.
Instead, DeepSeek shows it’s possible to launch a cutting edge model for a fraction of what its American competitors have spent on AI training, and without deployment delays or API rate limits. As a result, the U.S. equity markets—understanding DeepSeek’s efficiency as an over-investment in compute and inefficient approach by dominant players—are feeling the strain. DeepSeek’s emergence is a direct reflection of how America’s hesitance to embrace decentralized and open-source development is ceding ground to international rivals.
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