The coming AI war will be about whether truth can triumph over propaganda

As artificial intelligence (AI) becomes how we learn and understand the past, America and China are competing over systems that will shape what billions believe.

A library gave you 10 books.

Google gave you ten links.

Artificial intelligence (AI) increasingly gives you one answer.

Generative AI is becoming the layer between us and the record itself.

It reads and synthesizes information before we see it.

We ask what happened, what it means and whom to believe, and the model answers.

As billions of people use AI to encounter history, politics, science and culture, the contest between the United States and China extends beyond chips, compute and energy to the information from which AI learns and the rules that shape what it tells us.

CHINA IS BUILDING AN AI WAR MACHINE.

WASHINGTON MUST WAKE UP BEFORE IT’S TOO LATE Billionaire businessman Marc Andreessen argued early that the fight over what AI is allowed to say could become more consequential than the censorship battles of the social-media era and warned that China sees AI as a tool of authoritarian control.

OpenAI co-founder and CEO Sam Altman later described the contest as one between democratic and authoritarian visions of AI.

AI researcher and entrepreneur Dario Amodei has argued that democracies must maintain leadership because advanced AI will translate into economic, military and geopolitical power.

Tech entrepreneur Ben Horowitz has focused on diffusion, warning that Chinese open-weight models can carry political assumptions and values as they spread around the world.

THE AI YOU USE EVERY DAY IS BIASED — AND IT’S QUIETLY SHAPING YOUR WORLDVIEW, NEW REPORT SAYS The research now shows several ways political power can enter an AI system.