The rise of China’s AI companies has been such that even academics in the US are saying that the US will not have a monopoly on AI.
Columbia University professor Jeffrey D. Sachs has said that the US will likely not have a monopoly on AI. Speaking at the Boao Forum for Asia Annual Conference 2025, Sachs said that US would be better off collaborating with China than looking to always be a step ahead of it in AI.
“I use DeepSeek every hour for something. DeepSeek is part of the normal AI repertoire that I use on my phone, and it does a very good job,” Sachs said, referring to the viral Chinese AI Lab that’s made and open-sourced some very powerful AI models. “It shows a basic point that I have made for 40 years,” he continued, “which is that no country has a monopoly on technology or know-how.”
Sachs then challenged a long-held assumption in US foreign policy: “No country can claim that it will hold the choke point on another country. The United States constantly believed, over the last 80 years actually, that it held a monopoly of some technology that would give the US permanent dominance. (But) China is innovative in many systems so that it is comparable in power.”
He criticized the prevailing zero-sum mentality in US-China relations: “The United States would not maintain its lead uniquely against China..that I did say all the time. The idea in the United States is we need to ‘keep ahead’ of China on security, not we need to ‘cooperate’. We need to ‘keep ahead’ because the mentality is a win-lose, not a win-win mentality.”
Finally, Sachs offered a tongue-in-cheek suggestion, reflecting the potential of AI to offer alternative perspectives: “So maybe if the US officials asked DeepSeek what should we do, maybe DeepSeek would say you should collaborate together rather than trying to outrun us, because mutual benefit will be the right way.”
Sachs’s comments come at a time of escalating tensions between the US and China, with technology, particularly AI, being a major point of contention. The rise of DeepSeek was thought by many to be a Sputnik moment for the US AI industry, which showed that China was very close to catching up with it in AI capability. Such had been DeepSeek’s impact that CEOs of prominent labs, OpenAI and Anthropic, have asked for restrictions to be put on Chinese AI companies. The US already has some restrictions in place, with NVIDIA not allowed to sell its most advanced GPU chips to China.
But China seems to have innovated and created powerful AI models anyway. What’s more impressive is that they’ve made the models open source, which is spurring AI development in both the US and China. Sachs seemed to be saying that it was this collaborative approach that could not only benefit both countries but also mitigate the potential risks associated the new technology. It remains to be seen how the US decides how to approach AI, but there seems to be growing acceptance within the country that China’s could well end up being a peer to the US in the AI race.