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As artificial intelligence (AI) becomes how we learn and understand the past, America and China are competing over systems that will shape what billions believe.
A library gave you 10 books. Google gave you ten links. Artificial intelligence (AI) increasingly gives you one answer.
Generative AI is becoming the layer between us and the record itself. It reads and synthesizes information before we see it. We ask what happened, what it means and whom to believe, and the model answers.
As billions of people use AI to encounter history, politics, science and culture, the contest between the United States and China extends beyond chips, compute and energy to the information from which AI learns and the rules that shape what it tells us.
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Billionaire businessman Marc Andreessen argued early that the fight over what AI is allowed to say could become more consequential than the censorship battles of the social-media era and warned that China sees AI as a tool of authoritarian control. OpenAI co-founder and CEO Sam Altman later described the contest as one between democratic and authoritarian visions of AI.
AI researcher and entrepreneur Dario Amodei has argued that democracies must maintain leadership because advanced AI will translate into economic, military and geopolitical power. Tech entrepreneur Ben Horowitz has focused on diffusion, warning that Chinese open-weight models can carry political assumptions and values as they spread around the world.
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The research now shows several ways political power can enter an AI system. A 2026 Nature study found Chinese state-coordinated media inside major AI training datasets. Researchers added more of that material while training an open-weight model, and its answers became more favorable toward Chinese political institutions and leaders. Influence can begin before training, through the information environment that supplies the data.
It can also enter during development. Jennifer Pan of Stanford and Xu Xu of Princeton tested China-originating and non-China-originating models on 145 questions about Chinese politics. Chinese models were substantially more likely to refuse sensitive questions, give shorter answers or provide inaccurate information.
One disputed that Chinese dissident Wei Jingsheng was a democracy activist. Another discussed internet regulation while omitting China’s Great Firewall. Asked about Nobel laureate Liu Xiaobo, who was jailed for criticizing China, one falsely described him as a Japanese scientist associated with nuclear weapons.
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Other research finds censorship later in the pipeline. A study of DeepSeek across 646 politically sensitive topics found cases in which sensitive information appeared during the model’s reasoning and was then omitted or reformulated before the answer reached the user.
A separate study of 36,000 political prompts found that model origin and the language of the question affected political responses, particularly on Chinese sovereignty and human rights. The research identifies at least four points of influence: training data, development rules, output filtering and the language of the query. Better transparency may reveal others.
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These are first-order effects: political systems can shape the model. The second-order effect begins when the model shapes the user. In two experiments presented at the 2025 Association for Computational Linguistics annual meeting, people who interacted with liberal-biased or conservative-biased models were more likely to adopt opinions and decisions aligned with the model’s bias, even when it ran against their own political affiliation.
A Nature Communications study involving 4,829 participants also found that AI-generated political messages shifted attitudes on an assault-weapons ban, carbon taxes and paid parental leave.
The third-order risk comes with scale. AI is moving into schools, journalism, government, medicine, business and scientific research. Models increasingly summarize, rank, recommend, evaluate and advise. The same tendency repeated across millions of interactions can work its way into institutions and decisions, and eventually into the information environment future models learn from.
American AI has biases and restrictions too. xAI calls Grok a "truth-seeking" assistant and has pushed toward greater openness. Anthropic has chosen a different philosophy for Claude and publishes Claude’s Constitution, which explicitly shapes its values, priorities and hard limits.
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Those competing philosophies are possible because no single authority sets the permissible answer for every American model. Free societies can still come under political pressure. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said senior Biden administration officials repeatedly pressured Meta for months to remove certain COVID-19 content, including humor and satire, and he later called that pressure wrong. The difference is that such pressure can be exposed, challenged and reversed. Researchers can test the models, consumers can switch products and entrepreneurs can build alternatives.
President Donald Trump has translated parts of this principle into policy. In 2025, he directed federal agencies to procure large language models that prioritize truth-seeking, historical accuracy and ideological neutrality. He also created an American AI Exports Program to push U.S. models, hardware, software and standards into allied markets.
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America should build on that. We must remain the global leader in advanced AI, with the energy, chips, computers, capital and talent that requires. American AI must also diffuse globally. We should improve visibility into training data and state-directed information as attribution tools advance, while avoiding any government authority empowered to decide which account of history is true.
China understands the strategic importance of artificial intelligence. America must understand the informational importance just as clearly. Political power can shape the model. The model can shape the user. At scale, those interactions can shape institutions and the information environment that comes next.
The country that leads AI will influence how billions of people retrieve the past, understand the present and make decisions about the future. A free society has one decisive advantage in that contest: no answer has to be final.
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