US tech CEOs admit they want AI monopoly & 'unipolar world', blocking China's competition
US Big Tech oligarchs fear Chinese AI companies like DeepSeek. Billionaire Trump backer Peter Thiel admits they want monopolies: "competition is for losers". Anthropic CEO wants a US “unipolar world”.
The CEO of Anthropic, a US AI company backed by Amazon and Google, argued that the government must impose heavy restrictions on China in order to maintain a monopoly on artificial intelligence technology.
If the US government can block China from getting advanced semiconductors, we will "live in a unipolar world, where only the US and its allies have these models", wrote Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei.
Calling for more aggressive sanctions on China, Amodei warned, "Well-enforced export controls are the only thing that can prevent China from getting millions of chips, and are therefore the most important determinant of whether we end up in a unipolar or bipolar world".
This mindset, which is common in Silicon Valley, explains why US Big Tech corporations have been so afraid of emerging competitors in China.
It is widely assumed that capitalism is based on competition, but powerful US tech billionaire Peter Thiel argues the opposite. "Actually, capitalism and competition are opposites”, he wrote back in 2014 in the Wall Street Journal.
"Competition is for losers", asserted Thiel, a Republican Party mega-donor who is a close ally of US President Donald Trump and who previously employed Vice President JD Vance.
Thiel insisted that US tech companies should "look to build a monopoly", because, as he put it, "Monopoly is the condition of every successful business".
China's DeepSeek challenges US Big Tech monopoly
The Chinese company DeepSeek has shaken up the global debate about artificial intelligence.
It was taken for granted for years that the United States was leading the world in the development of AI, and that US Big Tech corporations based in Silicon Valley would inevitably dominate the industry.
Seemingly out of nowhere, however, DeepSeek published an AI model that is even better than those created by the leading US company OpenAI, which is half owned by Microsoft.
What was even more remarkable was that the DeepSeek model requires a small fraction of the computing power and energy used by US AI models.
The small Chinese company reportedly developed it for just around US $6 million. Meanwhile, US Big Tech corporations are pouring hundreds of billions of dollars per year into AI capital expenditure.
The cherry on top was that DeepSeek released its R-1 model with an open-source license, making it free for anyone in the world to download and run on their computer at home.
It is not an exaggeration to say that this was utterly ground breaking.
US government seeks to restrict Chinese technology
When DeepSeek went viral in the last week of January, quickly establishing itself as the most popular app in the United States, the government promptly declared it to be a threat to "national security”.
The US Navy immediately banned the use of DeepSeek, claiming that it has "security and ethical concerns" -- despite the fact that its models are open source.
Washington also sought to tighten its restrictions on China. Trump launched a trade war on China in his first term, levying tariffs and sanctioning high-tech companies like Huawei.
The US economic war on China was significantly expanded by the Joe Biden administration, which imposed export restrictions to prevent China from getting access to high-end chips that were assumed to be needed to train artificial intelligence models.
In response to DeepSeek's success, the US government has threatened third countries, especially Singapore, warning them that, if they sell semiconductors to China, they will be hit with heavy sanctions and tariffs.
Biden administration Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo admitted in 2021 that Washington's goal is "to slow down China’s rate of innovation”.
However, what the US government is learning is that every time it tries to ban one popular Chinese technology, another takes its place.
The US government temporarily banned TikTok, after unsuccessfully pressuring the hit app's Chinese parent company ByteDance to sell it to a US Big Tech monopoly. But what happened? Many Americans instead moved over to another Chinese app called RedNote - which is ironically named Xiaohongshu, or "Little Red Book" in Chinese.
This was mere weeks before DeepSeek overtook ChatGPT as the most popular app in the United States.
DeepSeek is just the beginning. US venture capitalists have cautioned that engineers in China are developing at least "10 top tier models, all trained from scratch". Major Chinese companies like Tencent, Alibaba, and ByteDance are involved, as well as many lesser-known names.
US Senate discusses "stealing" China's engineers and banning its apps
In Washington, the US government is deliberating plans to ban popular Chinese apps and "steal their best engineers".
These proposals were raised at a hearing of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in Washington on 30 January, titled "The Malign Influence of the People's Republic of China at Home and Abroad”.
"Let's steal their best engineers", stated Melanie Hart, a former State Department official who was invited to give testimony.
"China's national engineers developed the DeepSeek AI model that surprised the world this week", she continued. "You know, we'd be better off if the engineers behind that were working here in the US, at US universities and US companies".
Hart is an anti-China activist who previously oversaw the State Department's semiconductor strategy. She is now the director of the Global China Hub at the Atlantic Council, a hawkish Washington, DC-based think tank funded by the US government, NATO, and weapons corporations.
Another China hawk invited to give testimony in the Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing was Peter Mattis, a CIA veteran who serves as president of the Jamestown Foundation, a neoconservative think tank that is closely linked to the CIA. Mattis previously worked for the US House of Representatives Select Committee on the Strategic Competition between the United States and the Chinese Communist Party.
"What should we do about RedNote, and DeepSeek, and other platforms like that?", asked Senator Pete Ricketts, a pro-Trump Republican from Nebraska.
Mattis proposed that Chinese apps should either be forced to be sold to a US company, or banned.
"I think for those kinds of platforms, you have to adopt the same approach that was applied to TikTok, that either it is sort of removed from the control, or it is no longer available in the app stores", Mattis said.
"Great, thank you very much, Mr. Mattis", replied Senator Ricketts in approval, clearly pleased at the policy recommendation.
US Big Tech billionaires say "competition is for losers"
China's rapid advances have scared Big Tech corporations in the United States, demonstrating that they don't truly want competition.
This was once admitted openly by the US tech billionaire Peter Thiel, in his September 2014 Wall Street Journal article "Competition Is for Losers”.
Explaining his view that "capitalism and competition are opposites", Thiel wrote, "Capitalism is premised on the accumulation of capital, but under perfect competition, all profits get competed away".
"Only one thing can allow a business to transcend the daily brute struggle for survival: monopoly profits", he said.
"Monopoly is the condition of every successful business", Thiel declared, adding, "All happy companies are different: Each one earns a monopoly by solving a unique problem. All failed companies are the same: They failed to escape competition".
After publishing that column, Thiel was invited to give a lecture with the same title at Stanford University, in a computer science course in October 2014.
Thiel opened his Stanford talk stating:
I have a single idée fixe that I'm completely obsessed with, on the business side, which is that, if you're starting a company, if you're the founder, entrepreneur, starting a company, you always want to aim for monopoly, and, you want to always avoid competition. And so, hence, competition is for losers - something we'll be talking about today.
The man who invited Thiel to speak at Stanford in defense of monopolies was fellow Silicon Valley tech billionaire Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI.
OpenAI has lobbied the US government to take more action to cut off competition from Chinese companies like DeepSeek.
On 21 January 2025, just a day after returning to office, Trump invited Altman to the White House to announce the US government-backed "Stargate Project", pledging $500 billion in investment related to AI.
Trump and Altman were joined by fellow billionaires Larry Ellison, the executive chairman of Oracle, and Masayoshi Son, the CEO of SoftBank.
Peter Thiel says capitalism is more important than democracy
Thiel's argument that "capitalism and competition are opposites" was by no means meant as a criticism of capitalism. On the contrary, Thiel is an avowed defender of capitalism, and a self-declared "libertarian".
In 2009, Thiel published an article explicitly arguing against democracy. It was published by the libertarian think tank the Cato Institute, which is funded by right-wing billionaires and a Who's Who of large US corporations.
"I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible", Thiel wrote.
"The 1920s were the last decade in American history during which one could be genuinely optimistic about politics", he argued, lamenting that, "Since 1920, the vast increase in welfare beneficiaries and the extension of the franchise to women — two constituencies that are notoriously tough for libertarians — have rendered the notion of 'capitalist democracy' into an oxymoron".
In short, Thiel recognized that capitalism and democracy cannot simultaneously coexist - and as a billionaire oligarch, he naturally believes that capitalism is more important.
The USA is an oligarchy
Although he has extreme right-wing views, Thiel is by no means a fringe figure. He is one of the most powerful people in the United States.
In fact, Thiel is closely linked to US President Donald Trump, and he has funded many right-wing Republican politicians, including Trump himself.
Vice President JD Vance previously worked for Thiel, and the billionaire bankrolled his successful 2022 Senate campaign with $15 million in campaign contributions.
Trump has filled his administration with at least 13 billionaires, and has pledged to continue cutting taxes on them and their companies.
Trump clearly demonstrated to the world how the United States is an oligarchy when he invited the richest billionaires on the planet to sit with his cabinet members at his inauguration in Washington on 20 January.
Elon Musk, the CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, who is now the world's richest man, has an office in Trump's White House. He was joined at the inauguration by Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon; Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of Meta; Sundar Pichai, the CEO of Google and Alphabet; and Tim Cook, the CEO of Apple.
Together, these Big Tech oligarchs have nearly $1 trillion in wealth, which they amassed by establishing monopolies.
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei says US must block China's AI progress to maintain "unipolar world"
Another US tech CEO, Dario Amodei, published an article in the Wall Street Journal in January asking Donald Trump to put further restrictions on Chinese competitors, so the United States can have a monopoly on artificial intelligence.
Amodei penned this article with co-author Matt Pottinger, a neoconservative China hawk and former US military intelligence officer who served as the deputy national security adviser to Trump in his first administration.
Like OpenAI, which is half owned by Microsoft, Anthropic portrays itself as a plucky "startup”, but its main investors are Big Tech monopolies Amazon and Google.
In the Wall Street Journal op-ed, Amodei and Pottinger complained that "China is trying to catch up" in AI. He argued that "the U.S. must lead the world in artificial intelligence to preserve national security".
Having a monopoly on AI will "establish a historic advantage for the U.S. and the free world", they wrote, because "AI will likely become the most powerful and strategic technology in history".
Controlling AI "could also extend American military pre-eminence", stressed Amodei and Pottinger. But if the US doesn't have a monopoly, they warned, "another nation—most likely China—could surpass us economically and militarily".
To prevent China from competing, the tech CEO and his neocon co-author asked Trump to impose even more aggressive semiconductor controls, including government tracking of AI hardware exports.
In a follow-up article published a few weeks later at his personal website, Amodei argued that the rapid progress being made by Chinese AI companies like DeepSeek makes "export control policies even more existentially important”.
China must be blocked from getting "millions of chips", Amodei wrote, because, "If they can [get chips], we'll live in a bipolar world, where both the US and China have powerful AI models that will cause extremely rapid advances in science and technology".
"If China can't get millions of chips, we'll (at least temporarily) live in a unipolar world, where only the US and its allies have these models", he hoped. "Thus, in this world, the US and its allies might take a commanding and long-lasting lead on the global stage".
The US tech CEO cautioned, "Well-enforced export controls are the only thing that can prevent China from getting millions of chips, and are therefore the most important determinant of whether we end up in a unipolar or bipolar world".
The crux of the matter is that the US oligarchs are not interested in actual capitalism but rather in crony capitalism. In which corrupt overlords pay off politicians to NOT regulate properly, so that they rip off everyone and pretend to be engaged in capitalism.
China, ok the other hand has actually harnessed the potential value of capitalism, by ring fencing it into specific arenas and regulating it, and ensuring it’s not let loose to steal excess wealth in infrastructure and similar areas where real competition is not actually possible.
It’s not slavishly worshipping markets or pretending that markets can be implemented without a strong hand of regulation, and without a clear vision of what the public interest and benefit is, of employing market-based solutions, and equally in where the public interest lies in limiting and regulating the power of markets and capital owners.
This is why the crony capitalists of the west hate China: it lays bare their lies.
It’s also why they take such great pains to attempt to to label China as “autocratic” or “communist” and why the love to bang on about “the CCP” at every turn.
Because it’s downright embarrassing to be sitting in the US or Europe, pretending to be a liberal capitalist democracy, while China blows the lie open by actually using this abstraction called “capitalist competition” the way it should be used: as a limited-use tool, employed with extensive safeguards, rather than as a blind ideology.
Billionaires seem unable to identify themselves as the biggest impediment to societal evolution.