In elite financial journalism, omission of context is often the most sophisticated lie. The recent essay published by the Financial Timestitled Could the United States win the AI race but lose the war?is presented to the global reader as a sober and considered warning about the risks of American technology investment.
However, under the magnifying glass of serious geopolitical analysis, the text reveals itself not as a market analysis, but as an ideological pamphlet. A manifesto that, in its eagerness to attack the American industrial model and implicitly criticize the political opposition, ends up advocating China’s strategic weakness.
To understand distortion, you must first identify the illusionist. The author, Tim Wu, is not a neutral academic watching the bulls from the stands. He is a political actor with a defined agenda. Wu was Joe Biden’s antitrust “czar,” hired specifically by the White House to “tame” Silicon Valley. He is the author of The Curse of Bigness (The curse of greatness) and a man who compared current technology companies to the “robber barons” of the 19th century. His stated mission in life is to “fight corporate bullies.”
Knowing this, the subtext of your article becomes transparent. Wu isn’t worried about AI not working; He is terrified that it will, and that its success will forever consolidate the power of the very companies he has sought to dismantle since the Biden administration.
The fallacy of Chinese diversification: praising the loser
Wu’s central argument is that the United States is making a suicidal mistake by putting all its chips into artificial intelligence (AI), while China is prudently playing to diversify its economy toward “green technology,” such as solar panels, batteries and electric vehicles. Wu presents this as a master strategy of Beijing. A serious analyst calls it what it is: a mortgage on a failed ideology.
Wu sells the idea that making solar panels—commodities that anyone can assemble—has the same strategic weight as mastering extreme ultraviolet lithography or cutting-edge chip design. This is a child category error. China does not diversify out of genius; He does it out of necessity and desperation. Lacking access to cutting-edge semiconductors, blocked by sanctions that Wu veiledly criticizes, Beijing must shift its industrial capacity toward low-margin, high-saturation sectors, betting that the world will remain obsessed with a climate agenda that, politically, is retreating in the West.
The article of FT deliberately ignores the reality of the hardware. Wu talks about “good enough” and “open source” Chinese AI models, as if software can do magic without the silicon to back it up. It is the vision of a lawyer, not of an engineer or a strategist.
In the real world, AI is not an ethereal “bubble”; It is a physical industrial capacity that resides in the data centers and on GPUs that China cannot manufacture. Praising China for investing in windmills while losing the computing race is like praising an army for having excellent uniforms while its enemy has the atomic bomb.
Hatred of “greatness” and strategic blindness
What is most revealing about the text is how Wu’s personal ideology clouds his geopolitical judgment. As an official who advocated for repealing Section 230 and breaking up companies like Facebook, Wu is unable to accept that capital concentration is, paradoxically, America’s greatest defensive advantage.
The development of Artificial General Intelligence, or AGI, or even high-level AI systems, requires levels of investment, or capexthat no startup garage can afford.
Demand natural monopolies or quasi-monopolies with the financial backing of Microsoft, Google or Amazon. Wu sees these $400 billion investments as a sign of dangerous “groupthink” and a speculative bubble. A realist sees this as the Manhattan Project of the 21st century, funded by the private sector.
By attacking this massive expense, the Financial Times lends its platform to an argument that directly benefits the West’s rivals. If the United States were to heed Wu, breaking up its tech companies, blocking mergers, and “diversifying” into subsidized green technologies, it would voluntarily give up its only asymmetric advantage: computational supremacy.
Wu prefers a “fair” market of small and medium-sized companies losing the war against China, rather than a market of “oligopolies” winning it. It is ideological purity above national survival.
The ghost of Trump and subtle propaganda
The partisan tone of the analysis cannot be ignored. Wu laments that the United States has “cut back support for clean energy investment” and implicitly attributes this to a lack of state direction or misdirection under Republican administrations. There is a palpable nostalgia for state leadership. Wu and the FT They suggest that China’s central planning model – where the Party decides that the priority is electric cars and the industry obeys – is superior to the creative chaos of the American free market, which has decided to bet on AI.
This narrative is dangerously similar to the propaganda emanating from Beijing, centered on the idea that democracies are dysfunctional and short-term, while authoritarianism allows for “rational long-term bets.” The reality is that China’s bet on electric vehicles and batteries creates a graveyard of unsold cars and a global trade war, while the United States’ “irrational bet” on AI redefines human productivity.
He Financial Times as a vehicle of confusion
That a newspaper of the stature of Financial Times publishing this text without an obvious disclaimer about the author’s conflict of interest is symptomatic of the crisis of traditional media. We are introduced to an activist anti-tech disguised as a technological guru.
Wu’s article is not an analysis of why AI might fail: it’s wishful thinking. Wu wants AI to be a bubble, because if it isn’t, his career dedicated to combating corporate “greatness” will have been in vain. He wants China’s “technology for the people” strategy, like solar panels, to be superior to “technology for the elite,” like AGI, because that validates his social democratic worldview.
But desires don’t move markets or win wars. Meanwhile, the chips do. And while Wu writes elegant essays about how the West is losing its way, in the laboratories of the United States and the foundries of Taiwan, the future is being built, away from ink and close to silicon. The danger is not that the United States will lose the war by betting on AI; The risk is that you will listen to the prophets of corporate resentment and decide to stop running.
Things as they are
Mookie Tenembaum tackles tech topics like this every week with Claudio Zuchovicki on his podcast Artificial Intelligence: Financial Perspectivesavailable on Spotify, Apple, YouTube and all platforms.
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