Tech Legal Brief #4 – The Deeper Implications of DeepSeek

+ How the international community should respond to the tech broligarchy

The Deeper Implications of DeepSeek

The deeper implications of DeepSeek are not technological but political.

For years, US BigTech companies have avoided democratic governance by using competition with China as an excuse for a continued permit to do what they want without regulation.

“If you don’t leave us alone, China will win. Is that what you want?”

This argument has been used by Facebook, Microsoft, Google, Amazon, and OpenAI whenever they are faced with scrutiny by the US Congress. So far, invoking the word "China" has been a get-out-of-jail-free-card as evidenced by the fact that new laws and regulatory scrutiny have not at all affected the value of BigTech companies.

Now, DeepSeek has revealed that even with the considerable democratic mandate BigTech has been afforded and the unearthly amount of capital BigTech is throwing at developing world-leading AI models, China is still winning.

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But the political implications are even deeper.

We have to recognize that there is a political reality behind AI.

As Ali Alkhatib wrote in the blog post “Defining AI”:

“I think we should shed the idea that AI is a technological artifact with political features and recognize it as a political artifact through and through. AI is an ideological project to shift authority and autonomy away from individuals, towards centralized structures of power. Projects that claim to “democratize” AI routinely conflate “democratization” with “commodification”. Even open-source AI projects often borrow from libertarian ideologies to help manufacture little fiefdoms.”

If we think of AI as a political project more than a technology, the massive attention surrounding DeepSeek-R1 makes a lot of sense. By outperforming BigTech on a budget, DeepSeek is not just challenging the profits of a few big technology companies, but undermining what has become the political identity of an entire global superpower.

DeepSeek is shattering the models of American capitalism as well-explained by Richard J Murphy, Professor of Accounting Practice, at Sheffield University Management School.

OpenAI has responded to the situation by quick-launching o3-mini, its own reasoning model, for free, and is asking for an additional round of funding of $40 billion which would value the company at $300 billion (WSJ). The search for more funding at such a fatal time is fully aligned with BigTech’s playbook.

Once OpenAI is considered to be powerful and essential enough to America’s national security and global economic competitiveness, the US regulators have no choice but to label it “too big to fail” and grant it a get-out-of-jail-free card.

Read more about BigTech’s playbook here:

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