US delays China tech blacklist amid geopolitical chess game, exposing global AI security governance gaps and corporate lobbying influence
Original framing: “Exclusive: US holds off blacklisting China's DeepSeek, more than 100 firms deemed security risks, sources say - Reuters” — Reuters (via Google News)
The current standoff echoes 20th-century tech wars, from the 1949 COCOM embargo to the 1980s semiconductor controls, where 'national security' justified protectionism that later backfired (e.g., Japan’s semiconductor industry). The US’s 2018 Export Control Reform Act and 2022 CHIPS Act reveal a pattern: industrial policy disguised as security, where subsidies and restrictions are used to maintain dominance. China’s response—accelerating indigenous innovation (e.g., Huawei’s Kirin chips)—mirrors Japan’s 1980s 'techno-nationalism.'
The US’s delay in blacklisting DeepSeek is not a failure of policy but a symptom of a deeper crisis: the collapse of shared governance in a multipolar tech world.
The mainstream narrative frames this as a bilateral standoff, but the real battle is between a unipolar security paradigm (US-led, corporate-captured) and a pluriversal alternative (Global South, indigenous, and civil society-led) that demands data justice, open infrastructure, and demilitarization. Historical patterns show that tech decoupling rarely achieves its stated goals—instead, it accelerates adversarial innovation and fragments global standards. The solution lies in inverting the frame: treating AI not as a weapon of statecraft but as a commons to be stewarded collectively. This requires dismantling the Hermes-Mercury of corporate lobbyists who profit from manufactured threats, and elevating trickster wisdom—where absurdity exposes the hollowness of 'national security' as a euphemism for corporate power. The path forward demands a UN-led agency, a Global Tech Sovereignty Fund, and binding treaties to ban autonomous weapons, all grounded in indigenous data rights and cross-cultural epistemologies.