The release a few weeks ago of the Chinese DeepSeek program that sent some stocks reeling was actually a deliberate attack on the American tech sector made in a roundabout way by the Communist party of China, according to one China scholar.
Gordon Chang says "we know the DeepSeek people trained its large-language model using data created by Open AI's open-language model. In other words, this was intellectual property theft.
"But we also know they took a lot more chips to run their model than they've claimed, and they obviously spent much more than $6 million [that they claimed it cost] -- there are some estimates that the project cost $1.6 billion to actually develop.
"And I'm sure it took them a very long time to actually produce this.
"So this appears to be a communist party project, not a product of a private company," Chang says.
One of the advantages of the Chinese model of artificial intelligence was said to be the use of less energy in operation than similar American AI projects, but that's an unfounded boast by the Chinese makers of DeepSeek, Chang estimates.
"Clearly they're using more electricity than [the Chinese] let on because they're using many more chips than they first said.
"The Chinese communist party wanted to target US tech companies, and we saw the large stock market losses that have since been made up, and there will be more losses made up in the near future., largely because the claims made by DeepSeek, as we've seen, are not true.
But what now?
"Eventually the Trump administration will have to do something because of the intellectual property theft and I think this was a project to harm US tech companies."