Shahid Khan Naeem’s Jacobin essay traces how Silicon Valley turned the “new Cold War with China” into its favorite alibi. The founding text is Leopold Aschenbrenner’s 2024 “Situational Awareness” manifesto — a fired OpenAI researcher who compared AI to the Manhattan Project, then raised ~$100M for a hedge fund that imploded in July when China’s Moonshot AI shipped a cheaper open-weight model.
The shield has a documented history:
- Zuckerberg’s 6,500-word essay this month: obstructing AI energy and data centers is a “national security risk” in the race with China — Altman, Amodei, Thiel, and Andreessen all agree.
- Palantir’s Alex Karp, quoting Huntington at the Hudson Institute: “There are only two cultures that are going to win in the next year. It’s going to be us or China.”
- Zuckerberg’s leaked 2018 hearing notes, photographed by the AP: “Break up FB? US tech companies key asset for America; break up strengthens Chinese companies.”
- 2021: a letter from a dozen ex-national-security officials — including Leon Panetta — arguing antitrust would “cede U.S. tech leadership to China.” The bipartisan bills died anyway.
The essay’s sharpest contrast is between the two states that produced these industries. China torpedoed Jack Ma’s $37B IPO and split Alibaba six ways, wiping $2 trillion from the sector; the US blessed state-sanctioned monopolies — Microsoft-OpenAI profit-sharing, Nvidia’s 90% grip on AI chips. Neither is democratic.
None of this is accidental: the existential-race framing gives Silicon Valley insulation from democracy just as Americans, across the spectrum, turn against job automation, data centers, Flock cameras, and algorithmic rent-fixing. And after Gaza and the US war on Iran, the national security establishment needs a fresh existential threat to re-entrench.
Naeem’s closing question lands hard: how much longer will Americans surrender democratic control of the institutions that shape their lives?