Last month, John Moolenaar, chair of the House Select Committee on China, accused China of being “willing to buy what they can, and steal what they cannot, to advance their AI ambitions”. Experts were then invited to share their opinions to support the committee’s claims. It’s an old Washington playbook.

Whenever China gets ahead in something, whether it’s rocket launch capabilities or winning too many Olympic gold medals, it can only do so by cheating or stealing! Of course, everyone cheats and steals, including America and American companies. Let’s not forget what former US secretary of state Mike Pompeo once said about the Central Intelligence Agency: “I was the CIA director. We lied, we cheated, we stole. We had entire training courses.”

But stealing and cheating can only get you so far. Such accusations stem from ignorance and arrogance, or at least a wilful disregard for China’s emergence as a science powerhouse.

Second, the AI industry that US politicians are so proud of looks increasingly like a Ponzi scheme.

Third and last is that Americans always assume bigger is better, that is, the more computing power, the better an AI system. What Chinese AI pioneers such as DeepSeek have shown is that working smarter and more efficiently, even with limited computing power, can deliver a bigger bang for the buck.

All three issues are related. Let’s work through them together.