In January of 2025, through an incredible set of coincidences and less than one week after US President Donald Trump took office for his second term, a single Chinese startup named DeepSeek released a free AI model of such efficiency and quality that it immediately crashed the burgeoning AI stock sector, stripped billions of dollars in equity from AI giant Nvidia, and devalued the holdings of some of Americans richest investors. Chief among the companies negatively impacted by free and unrestricted release of this AI model was OpenAI, creators of ChatGPT, and onetime property of Elon Musk, right-hand man to the new President.
Or, if you want a different perspective, perhaps none of this is a coincidence at all, but an example of the emerging cyberpolitik, in which the age old tradition of 18 year old men carving out each others intestines in a sewage filled trench is replaced with sophisticated attacks on infrastructure, economic systems, and other electronic and digital assets, through a variety of increasingly obscure false-flag attacks that strain the definition of passive aggressive in the extreme.
Consider the timeline: there have been murmurings of a new AI model from DeepSeek from as far back as December 2024, so far as I can tell. But no code was released until after Trump’s January 20th inauguration. Imagine if Biden or Harris had had to deal with this disastrous day for the stock market during an election? Imagine how much the news might have been blunted if the code were released in December with ample religious holidays, a lame duck President, and a market already having a rough go of it? Instead, this happened as early as could possibly be solidly pinned down as “on Trump’s watch.”
The code was devastating in its economic impact and it directly harmed many of the affluent in Trump’s orbit. In fact, if anything, though it may have hastened the automation of developer and data worker jobs, the general populace who tend not to trade stocks as a source of income were far less impacted in the short term than the American gentry.
On the heels of this, DeepSeek was suddenly subject to a devastating cyberattack, likely at the hands of one or more alphabet agencies based out of the great state of Virginia.
Given enough space, I could write a book about the back and forth over banning TikTok, another Chinese property. I’d also take a hard look at Trump’s penchant for tariffs and we could all have a ripe discussion about the European undersea cables that keep getting inconveniently damaged by ships with Chinese ties. Suffice it say, while I leave it to the reader to make up their own mind, I can’t help but suspect that DeepSeek is not acting out of the goodness of their hearts, but at the direction of Beijing directly. It seems to me we are on the cusp of new era of cyberpolitik that only Neal Stephenson could have make-up. Realpolitik is over, fire up your cyberdecks and strap in for a bumpy ride.
Or, if you want a different perspective, perhaps none of this is a coincidence at all, but an example of the emerging cyberpolitik, in which the age old tradition of 18 year old men carving out each others intestines in a sewage filled trench is replaced with sophisticated attacks on infrastructure, economic systems, and other electronic and digital assets, through a variety of increasingly obscure false-flag attacks that strain the definition of passive aggressive in the extreme.
Consider the timeline: there have been murmurings of a new AI model from DeepSeek from as far back as December 2024, so far as I can tell. But no code was released until after Trump’s January 20th inauguration. Imagine if Biden or Harris had had to deal with this disastrous day for the stock market during an election? Imagine how much the news might have been blunted if the code were released in December with ample religious holidays, a lame duck President, and a market already having a rough go of it? Instead, this happened as early as could possibly be solidly pinned down as “on Trump’s watch.”
The code was devastating in its economic impact and it directly harmed many of the affluent in Trump’s orbit. In fact, if anything, though it may have hastened the automation of developer and data worker jobs, the general populace who tend not to trade stocks as a source of income were far less impacted in the short term than the American gentry.
On the heels of this, DeepSeek was suddenly subject to a devastating cyberattack, likely at the hands of one or more alphabet agencies based out of the great state of Virginia.
Given enough space, I could write a book about the back and forth over banning TikTok, another Chinese property. I’d also take a hard look at Trump’s penchant for tariffs and we could all have a ripe discussion about the European undersea cables that keep getting inconveniently damaged by ships with Chinese ties. Suffice it say, while I leave it to the reader to make up their own mind, I can’t help but suspect that DeepSeek is not acting out of the goodness of their hearts, but at the direction of Beijing directly. It seems to me we are on the cusp of new era of cyberpolitik that only Neal Stephenson could have make-up. Realpolitik is over, fire up your cyberdecks and strap in for a bumpy ride.
