The AI race is already over. People in Silicon Valley just haven’t emotionally processed it yet.
China doesn’t need to “beat” OpenAI feature-for-feature tomorrow. They just need models that are 90-95% as good at 10-20% of the cost. That completely nukes the economics these US companies were valued on.
Look at chinese models
* Kimi
* Qwen
* MiniMax
* DeepSeek
These aren’t toy models anymore. They’re absurdly capable, especially for coding and agent workflows. Cursor literally based their composer 2.0 model on chinese Kimi 2.5 – because developers care about output and price, not patriotic fanfiction from SF VCs. And I would argue – that their best IP – a composer 2.0 model and it apparently based on chinese model
And here’s the fatal problem nobody wants to admit:
US AI valuations were built on the assumption that after initial user base acquisition they can raise prices. The entire bubble depends on eventually charging enterprise customers massive premiums.
But you cannot raise prices when China is shipping near-frontier models for a fraction of the cost.
That destroys the “future monopoly margins” story.
Anthropic publishing pieces like “2028 AI Leadership” reads less like confidence and more like positioning for government support because they can see the wall coming. Suddenly everyone is talking about “national security,” “strategic leadership,” and “infrastructure subsidies.”
Why? Because the market is realizing open-weight and Chinese competition are compressing margins into oblivion.
And notice the timing:
* Microsoft already cut Copilot pricing/tiering.
* Anthropic adjusted tiers.
* Everyone is racing to bundle and discount before the commodity wave fully hits.
That’s not what dominance looks like.
That’s what margin panic looks like.
The US still has incredible research talent. But economically? The moat is evaporating in real time.
Software always trends toward cheaper, faster, more available competition. AI won’t magically violate that law just because Silicon Valley wants trillion-dollar valuations.
the takeaway – I would not invest into US ai companies.
Opinion: the AI race is almost over. China is winning
byu/cranberrie_sauce instocks
Posted by cranberrie_sauce
3 Comments
Don’t necessarily disagree with you, but you used a (presumably American) ai to write this garbage lol
Opinion: this is an ai slop bot
China propaganda number 1!