Chinese startup DeepSeek sent shockwaves through the tech industry earlier this year when it launched its artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot DeepSeek-R1. Within days, the Chinese model surpassed U.S.-based OpenAI’s ChatGPT as the most downloaded app on the U.S. iOS App Store – what industry leader Marc Andreessen called a “Sputnik moment” in the AI race.

U.S. AI stocks saw a subsequent decline of $1 trillion in market capitalization, with Nvidia’s stock plummeting 18 percent in a single day. Seemingly inexplicably, DeepSeek had developed its AI chatbot at a cost of just $5.6 million, orders of magnitude less than what OpenAI spent to build ChatGPT.

However, OpenAI subsequently alleged that DeepSeek didn’t build DeepSeek-R1 on its own but rather used OpenAI’s technology to create a competing model. As the New York Post reported, “Security researchers at Microsoft, which has poured billions into OpenAI, discovered last fall that individuals with possible links to DeepSeek were harvesting vast troves of data through OpenAI’s application programming interface.”

Chinese intellectual property (IP) theft is nothing new – a 2021 report by the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission found that China’s IP theft machine steals an estimated $600 billion in IP every year. But Americans should also understand that China’s AI advancements – and how those advancements might be weaponized by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) – are being fueled by engineers and developers educated right here in the United States.

The advent of another world-changing technology – the internet – at the turn of the century is instructive in how the CCP is now looking to harness AI as a tool to augment its own power.

In the early 2000s, the internet saw a surge in popularity throughout China as well as the rest of the world. Early Chinese internet pioneers like Sina and Sohu quickly attracted more than one million users.

The CCP, then led by Hu Jintao, ranked the internet among the top three most significant threats to the party’s dominance. Dr. Dang Junjie, a former high-ranking CCP official who defected to the West, told me that Hu referred to the battle against the free and open spread of information on the internet as a “smokeless war.” The CCP believed that its survival depended on its ability to “assert supremacy over online public opinion.”

Initially, Dang said, the party could only respond with “a legion of opinion makers who tried to tell people what to think about nearly everything.” This strategy “did not work very well.”

But the CCP was also working on another solution – a multi-pronged project known as the “Great Firewall” to localize the internet within Chinese territory, ensuring complete control over what users can and cannot see.

This is what exists in China today. The CCP maintains complete control over online information by requiring domestic platforms to censor content, promoting state-approved narratives, and cracking down on dissent through surveillance and harsh penalties. Foreign websites like Google, Facebook, and Twitter are all blocked.

The Great Firewall turned the internet, a technology that promised to connect the world like never before, into a powerful tool that helped the CCP further tighten its grip over the country and brainwash its population.

But as Dang told me, the Great Firewall would not have been possible without Western universities. The CCP’s Ministry of Security helped the children of top party officials gain admission to graduate and post-doctoral programs throughout the West, but primarily in the U.K. and the U.S., that provided all the necessary know-how to lock down the internet inside China.

“The West’s collaboration was of existential importance to the creation of the Great Firewall,” Dang said.

Beijing wasn’t subtle about its intentions, either. In 2008, the Chinese government launched an initiative known as the “Thousand Talents Program” (TPP), which was billed as a state-run initiative to recruit top scientists, researchers, and professionals from around the world, particularly in cutting-edge fields like AI, biotechnology, and quantum computing. But it quickly became obvious that TPP was a blatant state-run IP theft and corporate espionage ring.

A 2019 Senate report revealed that TPP went far past its recruitment goal of 2,000, ultimately recruiting more than 7,000 “high-end professionals.” The scheme included paying scientists and researchers to set up shadow laboratories in China that conducted research identical to their work in the United States. The report also detailed several instances in which Chinese nationals concealed their ties to the Chinese Academy of Sciences and worked on highly advanced semiconductor technologies critical to developing AI platforms like DeepSeek-R1.

AI now presents a threat to the CCP’s control, much like the internet did more than two decades ago. But Xi Jinping has learned from his predecessor, and Beijing is now attempting to co-opt AI for its own purposes – once again with an assist from Western corporations and educational institutions.

A recent analysis of 52 senior Chinese scientists and officials at the forefront of China’s AI industry found that “around half… pursued graduate education in the West, while 16 have previously worked at Microsoft in some capacity in the United States or China.”

Even more alarmingly, “two have relinquished their U.S. citizenship” after returning to China to work for Chinese AI companies. 22 Chinese tech leaders profiled in the analysis are suspected by U.S. authorities of having links to the Chinese military.

“They know that they must hold their grip over new technology or they will perish,” said one former Japanese security official, who spoke to me on the condition of anonymity.

China’s rapid AI advancements serve as a stark reminder that technological leadership is not just about innovation but also about control and power. The same expertise that once helped build an open internet is now being used to fortify digital authoritarianism, with unwitting contributions from Western institutions.

As the world enters an AI-driven era, the question remains: Will free societies safeguard their technological edge, or will they continue to aid regimes that seek to weaponize innovation against both their own people and global stability?

Ben Solis is the pen name of an international affairs journalist, historian, and researcher.