Tag: china

The Soft Antichrist Of The AI Age: What Everyone Is Missing About The US-China Arms Race

I. The word

Peter Thiel spent the back half of last year giving private lectures on the Antichrist, and the word has been loose in the discourse ever since. His political reading is the old one. The Antichrist is not a cartoon devil. He is the figure who arrives offering peace and safety, and who uses the fear of catastrophe to install one universal order. In Thiel’s telling that figure is a regulator. He stops technology in the name of survival. The price of the peace is stagnation.

I want the frame. I do not want his conclusion.

The more probable figure is not the one who promises safety. It is the one who promises growth. Most of the world does not lie awake about existential risk from machine intelligence. It lies awake about electricity, logistics, credit, tax collection, and a median citizen who is twenty four and needs work. To that world the universal offer is not a moratorium. It is a stack. Cheap. Financed. Hosted. Present. Already attached to the handsets, the ports, and the power.

That is the soft Antichrist. It does not arrive with a speech about ending history. It arrives as the only AI that can grow your GDP.

I am not writing theology. I am writing underwriting.

II. The comforting story

The market is telling itself a story. The AI race is a contest of models. America builds the best systems. China copies. Europe regulates. Capital therefore clusters around closed labs, chipmakers, and hyperscale cloud. The scoreboard is a benchmark table.

That story is not false. It is incomplete in a way that misprices power. It treats the richest customers as the only customers that matter. It treats evaluations as destiny. It treats national power as a software demo.

I disagree.

The race will be decided by who becomes the default operating system for the economies that still have the most growth left. Those economies will not adopt AI as a lifestyle product. They will adopt it as a growth tool. They will take the stack that is cheap, present, financed, and attached to what they already run. If that stack is Chinese, Beijing does not need to conquer anyone. It only needs to become expensive to leave.

III. Where the mass actually is

When Sargasso maps AI adoption across emerging GDP rather than across model releases, the picture is not the one the market is priced for.

Start with the denominator. On purchasing power terms, IMF projections for 2026 put China at about $44.3 trillion against $32.4 trillion for the United States. India is near $18.9 trillion. Indonesia clears $5.4 trillion and Brazil $5.2 trillion. Turkey is at $4.0 trillion, Mexico $3.6 trillion, Saudi Arabia $2.9 trillion, Egypt $2.6 trillion, Nigeria $2.4 trillion. Nominal dollars still flatter America, and by a wide margin. China’s nominal print is about $20.9 trillion against the same $32.4 trillion for the United States. Both numbers are true. They answer different questions. Nominal tells you who can buy foreign assets. PPP tells you how much physical and administrative activity there is to automate. For an adoption thesis, the second number is the one that matters.

Ray Dalio has been describing the political consequence in plain terms. He calls it a tribute system. A hierarchical order in which leaders travel to Beijing to acknowledge relative power in exchange for access and stability. He ties it to a growing view abroad that American security guarantees will not be honored under stress. I take the framing seriously. I do not treat it as scripture. Ports and rail were the first set of rails. Models will be the next set.

IV. The evidence is already in the download data

This part of the argument is no longer speculative.

Over roughly four years, the American share of model downloads on Hugging Face fell from about sixty percent to the mid teens by late 2025, according to reporting in The Wire China. Hugging Face’s own one year review of the DeepSeek moment is blunt on the composition shift. DeepSeek R1 became the most liked model on the platform in its history. The top of that list is no longer majority American. Baidu went from zero public Hugging Face releases in 2024 to more than one hundred in 2025. ByteDance and Tencent raised their release counts eight to nine fold. Of newly created models under a year old, downloads for Chinese models surpassed any other country, including the United States. Western startups and researchers now routinely fine tune Chinese base models because those are the largest open weights available.

The Wire China’s Southeast Asia reporting puts the commercial logic in local language. A Jakarta lab head said developers will always pick the cheapest one. A Malaysian founder said he wants the biggest model and there is no Western open source offering at that size. Chinese cloud providers were running thirty seven availability zones across six Southeast Asian regions against thirty across four for the Western field.

None of this shows up cleanly in a frontier benchmark table. All of it shows up in switching costs three years from now.

V. The institutional layer

Beijing is not leaving the volume layer to price alone. In July 2026 it stood up the World Artificial Intelligence Cooperation Organization in Shanghai, with twenty nine founding members. Public reporting names Russia, Kazakhstan, Pakistan, Indonesia, Brazil, and a broader set spanning Africa and Latin America among the signatories. The five year commitments attached to the body, as reported by Caixin and The Diplomat, are unglamorous and therefore serious. Training placements. Joint application centers with regional blocs. A weather early warning system deployed into dozens of countries.

Read that list as an underwriter. Training placements create the administrators who will write the next procurement. Application centers create the reference deployments. Weather systems create dependency inside a ministry that cannot afford an outage. Standards get set that way. Not with a better model. With a bureaucracy that has already learned one.

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Chinese criminals posed as Holocaust victims’ descendants to get German citizenship

A Der Spiegel investigation published Thursday has uncovered an alleged criminal network that helped people, mainly from China, pose as the grandchildren and great-grandchildren of Jews persecuted by the Nazis in order to obtain German citizenship and passports.

According to the report, some of the applicants were Chinese nationals seeking to escape law enforcement in their own country and were able to do so with the help of German authorities that accepted fraudulent family histories linking them to Jewish victims of Nazi persecution.

The adoption of Jewish identities by Germans and others is not new and has sometimes been explained by a desire to distance oneself from the legacy of the nation that committed the Nazi crimes, or to claim moral authority and authenticity when criticizing Israel.

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How Your Amazon Package Was Spying On You Before It Got Here

The crane lowers the container. The forklift moves it to the warehouse. And the whole time, the ship it came off of has been sucking up U.S. military signals from the harbor — and beaming them back to Beijing. For thirty years. In American ports.

COSCO has been conducting the secret signals intelligence collection for Beijing for decades, the two senior officials confirmed. This intelligence collection is designed to support the military communications technologies and encryption developments of countries such as the United States, Europe and others in Asia, the two officials said. Once this intelligence is collected by COSCO it is used by the Chinese government to support its position in territorial disputes, for maritime reconnaissance and to provide early warning of possible military action by foreign forces, the two officials explained.

According to the officials, COSCO is using sophisticated signals intelligence collection equipment to track the communications of other ships and aircraft on the high seas, often to monitor crucial trade routes as well as routes used by military vessels.

COSCO, the world’s fourth-largest ocean carrier, did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the allegations published by Reuters. China’s embassy in Washington, however, called the reports “baseless” in a statement published late on Tuesday. “We oppose vilifying China by peddling the so-called ‘intelligence collection’ narrative, which is totally baseless,” said Liu Chang, a spokesman for the embassy. He said that China would never ask a company or individual to “collect or provide data, information or intelligence located abroad against local laws.”

These revelations are highly significant to the upcoming meeting between U.S. President Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping at a Washington summit set to take place later this month. Trade is expected to be high on the agenda as well as other security matters.

A January 2025 listing by the Pentagon of COSCO as one of several companies to be considered to be controlled by the People’s Liberation Army could have significant commercial and reputational consequences for COSCO. However, the listing is not a formal sanction and has not yet been implemented into law. In April 2025 a report by the U.S. Naval War College examined the use of intelligence collection by China’s fishing fleets as well as by its commercial shipping fleet.

COSCO Shipping Company is the world’s biggest ocean carrier, operating hundreds of ships across the globe, visiting major U.S. ports as well as the ports of Europe and other strategic locations around the world including the Strait of Hormuz, South China Sea and around Taiwan.

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The State Is Coming For Your Roomba

The federal government has discovered another menace to the republic: the vacuum cleaner.

In July, the Federal Communications Commission added foreign-produced “advanced robotic devices” to its Covered List, generally preventing new models from receiving the authorization needed to be imported, marketed, or sold in the United States. Although early headlines emphasized Chinese humanoid robots and mechanical dogs, Sean Hollister reported in The Verge that the rule also encompasses robotic vacuums, lawnmowers, delivery machines, and many warehouse robots. It potentially applies to almost any wireless, software-controlled ground robot weighing more than 4.4 pounds and capable of perceiving its surroundings.

This is not yet a confiscation campaign. Americans may continue using their existing vacuums, and retailers may sell models that were previously authorized. The prohibition falls principally on future foreign-produced models unless their manufacturers secure conditional approval. Yet the distinction makes the policy more absurd, not less. According to the Federal Communications Commission’s own fact sheet, the supposed security danger is serious enough to exclude new household products but not serious enough to affect previously purchased machines – or even purchases and use by federal agencies.

The security concerns are not imaginary. Sean Hollister himself had documented in an earlier The Verge article in February how a vulnerability in DJI Romo robotic vacuums allowed a researcher to obtain information from roughly 7,000 devices, including room maps, location data, and, in some circumstances, camera access and remote control. A machine carrying sensors through every room can plainly become an instrument of surveillance when its manufacturer handles data irresponsibly.

But a real problem does not vindicate every coercive response proposed in its name. The FCC’s rule does not primarily distinguish secure robots from insecure ones. It distinguishes foreign production from domestic production. Jennifer Pattison Tuohy observes in “The Ban on Robot Vacuums Won’t Make Them Safer, Only Worse” that a vacuum assembled in Massachusetts is not automatically more secure than one assembled in Shenzhen. The government is restricting where machines are made without demonstrating that domestic manufacture guarantees encrypted storage, responsible data retention, local processing, independent auditing, or competent software maintenance.

From a libertarian standpoint, the first question is not whether officials can imagine a danger. They can always imagine one. The question is whether the government may forcibly prevent peaceful adults from purchasing a product because bureaucrats believe that they have evaluated its risks better than the buyer has. A person owns his home, his money, and his network. He may sensibly refuse to place an internet-connected camera on his floor. He may instead purchase one after reading disclosures, disabling cloud functions, installing firewall rules, or deciding that the convenience exceeds the risk. That judgment belongs to the property owner, not to a federal licensing authority.

The Austrian case against the ban begins with consumer choice. In his explanation of the concept of consumer sovereignty, Robert P. Murphy explains that Ludwig von Mises regarded consumer spending as a continuing plebiscite directing entrepreneurs toward the goods people value. In a market, producers retain their position only by persuading customers. The FCC reverses that relationship. Consumers may vote for inexpensive Chinese vacuums, privacy-oriented American machines, offline models, or no robot at all – but only after Washington has removed the candidates it dislikes.

Ludwig von Mises described this mechanism precisely in chapter 39 of Human Action. Restrictive intervention forbids or makes more expensive particular methods of production, transportation, and distribution. It thereby eliminates means that people could have used to satisfy their wants. Government may redirect production, but it cannot conjure the factories, skilled labor, components, logistical networks, and accumulated knowledge that its decree assumes into existence. It can force robotic production away from locations selected through market calculation; it cannot guarantee that the replacement arrangement will be equally productive.

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Mistress of Imprisoned Ex-FBI Special Agent Tried to Report His Crimes with China and the Bidens – Now She’s Dead

Allison Guerriero, FBI Agent Charles McGonigal’s ex-mistress turned whistleblower, wrote the following on her Substack about the OIG politely declining to investigate her claims that former top Biden FBI Executive, Charles McGonigal was involved in fraudulent activities with China as well as with Europeans. (emphasis added)

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The Department of Justice Office of the Inspector General (OIG) officially declined to open a case into the FBI’s handling of matters involving Charles McGonigal — and instead punted the whole thing back to, wait for it… the FBI.

Hmmm so the FBI is involved in some alleged crimes and corruption? What better agency to investigate this than the FBI!

The jokes just write themselves…

Yes, really.

It is my belief that I witnessed deeply troubling conduct by former senior FBI official Charles McGonigal. I reported that conduct through the appropriate channels, at great personal risk. It is also my belief that this conduct involved potential espionage, uncharged sanctions violations, and serious financial irregularities.

So naturally, the agency I believe helped cover it up is now being asked to investigate… itself.

This is like reporting your house was robbed, and the police say:

“Don’t worry, the suspect you named is a retired cop — he’ll drop by later and see if you’re missing anything.”

Honestly, I expected the OIG to decline and I was looking forward to posting it solely for the jokes. Every whistleblower I’ve ever spoken to receives some version of the same polite form letter. It’s like a “thank you for your bravery” Hallmark card, sealed with a bureaucratic shrug.

To be clear: it is my belief that this isn’t about one bad actor. I believe this is systemic. The same system that failed to act on credible information is now in charge of reviewing itself — and we’re all supposed to pretend that’s accountability.

It’s not.

But I’m still here. I’m still speaking out. And I’m still fighting — despite the retaliation, the legal bills, and the silence from the very institutions that were supposed to protect whistleblowers like me.

If you’d like to help me stay in this fight, please consider supporting my legal defense and basic expenses here:

http://www.GiveSendGo.com/AllisonGuerriero

And you can follow me on X (formerly Twitter), where I post updates, public filings, and the kind of truths that make federal agencies squirm:

Thanks for reading. More to come.

— Allison Guerriero

(See the letter from the OIG at Ms. Guerriero’s Substack) 

Ms. Guerriero was correct.  It turns out FBI’s finest – Charles McGonigal – was providing secret information to China related to Hunter Biden’s business in China and was never convicted under the Biden Administration.  This is reported from the same entity that recently turned down a review of Ms. Guerriero’s complaint into the same matter.

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Chinese Student Charged With Lying To Border Agents Over Alleged Airport Photo Assignments From Beijing

A Chinese national studying at a Canadian university has been charged with lying to American officials to conceal that he took photographs at a Chicago airport cargo facility at the direction of a suspected Chinese official, according to a federal complaint filed in Detroit on Aug. 26.

Zeng Weiheng, born in 2004, is charged with making false statements in a matter under federal jurisdiction. An undergraduate student at the University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada, Zeng was issued a B1/B2 visitor visa in October 2022 and has entered the United States 24 times since then, according to an affidavit filed with the complaint by an FBI agent.

He was arrested on Aug. 26.

Authorities stopped Zeng for an initial screening on Aug. 23 at the Ambassador Bridge border crossing in Detroit, after linking his vehicle to a security incident at a FedEx cargo facility at Chicago O’Hare International Airport on April 21.

That day, FedEx employees saw an Asian male spending roughly 20 minutes at the facility. Surveillance footage showed the man climbing onto a construction forklift to take photographs and attempting to open a parked delivery truck and shipping trailer before driving off in a minivan bearing an Ontario license plate.

Zeng underwent three interviews with U.S. Customs and Border Protection officials during secondary screening, during which his account of his April trip changed. according to court documents.

In his first interview, Zeng claimed that he had visited tourist sites during his April trip, and the photos of planes in his phone were “pictures of model aircraft being tracked for a flight radar website,” authorities said. When pressed in a second interview, Zeng allegedly admitted going to the FedEx facility to take photos of planes and revealed that he had also trespassed at a FedEx facility at Toronto Pierson Airport in 2025.

By the third interview, Zeng revealed that a contact in China had “assigned him specific planes and their tail numbers to photograph” and he was paid $20 to $30 per photograph, the court documents allege.

In his subsequent interview with the FBI, Zeng admitted that the aircraft photography was a cover story devised by his handler, and the “true task was to obtain interior photographs of the FedEx facility,” according to the affidavit.

His Chinese contact “was primarily interested in information on transportation and logistics in the United States” and “asked for information of flight freight logistics, bus routes, and trains routes and schedules,” the affidavit said.

Zeng also told the FBI that he suspected his Chinese contact was a Chinese regime official working for one of China’s security departments, in part because the contact had provided him with “videos of scenes that only security officials would have access to.”

For his communication with the Chinese contact, Zeng said he was mailed SIM cards from China’s state-run China Telecom, which allowed him to “by-pass Canadian cellular network and connect directly with the Chinese provider network” to send text messages, according to the affidavit.

Zeng was instructed to use the SIM cards only in a Huawei-made phone, swapping in a new card every few months and destroying the old one. He was also told never to bring the phone with him on trips to the United States.

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Trump says communities that reject data centers ‘want to end up being backwards and poor’ — President claims China ‘could not be happier’ with AI data center backlash in the US

Donald Trump doesn’t appear to be a fan of the data center backlash that has swept the nation. Posting on his Truth Social platform, the President said that communities that reject data centers only do so because “they want to end up being backwards and poor,” and posited that China “could not be happier with this anti Data Center movement.” The comment comes amid a wide, albeit unorganized, pushback to data center buildouts in the United States that’s left local communities and municipalities reckoning with an unanticipated and rapid infrastructure buildout.

Local pushback has been widespread and consistent across the country. Earlier this month, an Amazon data center came under fire for circumventing public feedback based on old laws. Since April, leaders across the nation have received an elevated number of credible death threats related to data centers since April. And last month, the number of local bans on data center developments crossed over 500 within the United States.

The President says to “let Data Reign” if communities “want to be successful and rich, with far lower taxes and jobs all over the place.” Presumably, the President missed a comma after “taxes” and does not mean that data centers will lower the number of jobs available. The economic argument surrounding data centers is a tough issue to quantify, though it’s not completely detached from reality.

A July study from Georgia Tech found that data center developments increase local employment by 3.5%, total wages by 5%, business establishments by 4.7%, and median household income by 1.9%. Further, the developments reduce unemployment rates. Critically, however, the study found that these benefits mainly show up in metropolitan areas, calling the benefits in rural areas “negligible.” The study also highlights that data centers often employ fewer than 100 permanent workers, with specialized services “imported from outside the country.”

The research also looked into trade-offs with electricity prices, finding that prices rise an average of 5% after a data center is built in a community.

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Homeland Security warns of Chinese parts in election machines, will require paper ballot audits

The Homeland Security Department will require random audits of paper ballots in the midterm elections, citing long-simmering concern that the nation’s largest voting technology companies use Chinese parts in their voting machines, according to a letter from Secretary Markwayne Mullin released Thursday.   

Mullin sent the letter to the White House Transparency Task Force earlier this week outlining the dangers posed by Chinese components in American voting machines and the way that these components could be exploited by hackers or other malicious actors.

The letter highlighted longstanding concerns first raised in a bipartisan manner before the 2020 election, but which officials appear to have taken little action on in the intervening years.

“Voting machines with components manufactured by foreign adversaries introduce significant security risks,” Mullin wrote. “These vulnerabilities mean that malicious actors could potentially compromise election infrastructure at any stage of the supply chain, even before the machines are assembled or deployed.” 

The secretary explained, “If a component is tampered with during manufacturing, it could serve as a point-of-entry for hackers, allowing for the possibility of synchronized attacks across multiple machines and jurisdictions.”

Two Biden administration Intelligence Community memos in 2024 identified China as “the most active and persistent cyber threat” and assessed that China, along with Iran and Russia, has “the technical capability to access some U.S. election-related networks and systems.”  

You can read Mullin’s letter below: 

08.20.2026 – WHTF Letter Commerce – S1 SIGNED.pdf

Earlier this year, the Trump administration took drastic action to ban the import of all internet routers manufactured in foreign countries because of the unacceptable security risks posed by Chinese hacking capabilities.

Internet routers connect computers, cellphones, and other electronic devices to the internet, the backbone of the modern economy.

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VoterGA: Declassified Intelligence Reveals Massive China Election Interference Cover-up

President Donald Trump delivered a primetime address from the White House on July 16, 2026, on the subject of US election security.

During the speech, Trump announced the declassification of intelligence documents and made a series of allegations involving China, the 2020 election, and a subsequent effort by intelligence officials to withhold information from him and from Congress.

As reported earlier by Patriot Perspective, one CIA report outlined China’s broader objective as leveraging domestic and foreign groups opposed to Trump to reduce his support, pressure him to resign, or stop him from winning another term.

Another report alleged that information collected from millions of TikTok users could be used to place authentic names, addresses, and identification numbers on the fraudulent licenses, making them more difficult to detect.

The release by the US government in July, via an earlier TGP report by Patriot Perspective, revealed China’s massive, multi-year US election interference campaigns.

The documents depict a foreign adversary determined to exploit America’s political divisions.

The most alarming material concerns the collection of Americans’ personal information.

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Chinese Hackers Broke Into NASA, Federal Reserve, DOJ & Senate: FBI Announces

The United States Department of Justice has on Wednesday announced US authorities thwarted a major state-sponsored hack which saw a temporary intrusion into NASA, the Federal Reserve, Senate, the DOJ, Department of Energy, and the Department of Health and Human services, along with four unnamed companies in the US and South Korea.

“Today we announced the disruption of a global botnet and hacking platform used by Chinese state-sponsored hackers to target U.S. critical infrastructure,” said FBI Director Kash Patel.

“These tools were used by PRC cyber actors to hide the origin of their attacks. Thanks to the work of FBI San Diego, FBI Cyber Division, and DOJ partners, we seized adversary infrastructure and shut these platforms down,” he added.

Domains utilized by two hacking platforms identified as “QScan” and “QTRouter” were seized by the DOJ in the large scale counter-cyberespionage operation.

Describing a pervasive botnet which was ultimately believed to be backed by Chinese state actors, The Wall Street Journal details that the “goal was to blend in with legitimate networking traffic, making the hacking activity hard to trace, federal officials say.”

“The group exploited software vulnerabilities to launch cyberattacks against U.S. government agencies, power companies and hospital systems, and operated a worldwide network of hacked devices—known as a botnet—to conduct its hacking campaigns, according to Brett Leatherman, the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s top cyber official,” WSJ continues.

As for the specific allegation that this had state backing, the DOJ press release states:

People’s Republic of China (PRC) state-sponsored group known as “QTFY,” employed by China-based Nanjing Xinjiuwei Network Technology Company, created and operated QScan and QTRouter.

The DOJ announcement additionally outlines efforts at concealment and ‘plausible deniability’ in the following:

QTRouter consists of these compromised IoT devices, as well as commercial proxy service devices and leased virtual private servers. QTRouter then serves as an “obfuscation network” – meaning it allows QTFY and other malicious cyber actors to conceal the PRC-origin of their computer intrusion activities because the malicious communications appear to originate from computers (such as those compromised by QScan) that are outside of the PRC and may even be local to the targeted networks. Because the seized domains were hard-coded into both the QScan and QTRouter malware and used for essential tasks such as communication and authentication, the court-authorized seizures made QScan and QTRouter inoperable. 

Neither Beijing’s foreign ministry nor the Chinese embassy in Washington have officially responded to the allegations, and as has been the pattern in the past is likely to reject the US charge altogether.

Earlier this year Google was among those warning of imminent stepped-up Chinese and Russian targeting of US defense companies. 

Google’s prior report seemed to preview some of the techniques on display in this latest hack. The report cited observations of “more China-nexus cyber espionage missions directly targeting defense and aerospace industry than from any other state-sponsored actors over the last two years.”

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