For the past few years, Silicon Valley and Washington have been largely aligned around the notion that America must win the “A.I. arms race” with China. Fears of a second Sputnik moment deepened in 2017, when China’s State Council published a seminal document detailing Beijing’s plans to achieve global A.I. dominance by 2030. In January, the panic spread to Wall Street after Chinese startup DeepSeek launched a free, open-source L.L.M. whose rapid and seemingly cheap development cost U.S. tech stocks about $1 trillion in the course of a single day. The incoming Trump administration quickly adopted the same geopolitical narrative as the largest A.I. developers: A growth-at-all-costs strategy wasn’t just good for Wall Street—it was also a national security imperative.