The US is in a race to ‘beat China’ at AI. Or is it? What if I told you that powerful actors in the US have built the story of an all-or-nothing race to get what they want?

More like this: Computer Says Kill: A License for Unlimited War w/ Amos Toh

In part four of Computer Says Kill we are joined by Lis Siegel who shares the history. We start with a document produced by China in 2017, and arrive at today when the Chinese bogeyman is being used to drive money, political influence and supply chain control to a few US tech giants. Listen in for some insight into how we got here.

Further reading & resources:

• Examining AI Safety as a Global Public Good: Implications, Challenges, and Research Priorities — Lis Siegel et al, March 2025
• Silicon Valley enabled brutal mass detention and surveillance in China, internal documents show — AP News, September 2025
• A Dark-Money Campaign Is Paying Influencers to Frame Chinese AI as a Threat — Taylor Lorenz, Wired, May 2026
• Slogan Politics by Jinghan Zeng
• Breakneck: China’s Quest to Engineer the Future by Dan Wang
• Final Report from the National Security Commission for AI — 2021
• Yellow Techno-Peril: The ‘Clash of Civilizations’ and anti-Chinese racial rhetoric in the US–China AI arms race — Kerry McInerney 2024
• Bernie Sanders urges international cooperation to halt AI’s ‘runaway train’ — The Guardian, April 2026

**Subscribe to our newsletter to get more stuff than just a podcast — we run events and do other work that you will definitely be interested in!**

Computer Says Maybe is produced by Georgia Iacovou, Kushal Dev, Marion Wellington, Sarah Myles, Van Newman, and Zoe Trout