The New Cold War Is an Alibi for Tech Elites’ Impunity
Silicon Valley is increasingly embracing the narrative that the US is in an existential battle for technological dominance with China. The story is a convenient shield against efforts to rein in the tech industry’s power.
A bipartisan backlash against the growing power of Silicon Valley to dictate the terms of American life is underway. The industry hopes to use fears of China’s rise to shield itself from democratic accountability. (Tom Williams / CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images)
Before the spectacular implosion of his $45 billion AI hedge fund late last month, twenty-four-year-old Leopold Aschenbrenner had laid out a road map for a new Cold War with China.
In June 2024, shortly after being fired from OpenAI, Aschenbrenner published a treatise titled “Situational Awareness,” analogizing his work in Silicon Valley to the race to build the atomic bomb. The nuclear secrets that had permanently changed the world’s balance of power and won World War II for the United States, he wrote, had been upstaged. Advancements being made across Silicon Valley augured the imminent arrival of artificial superintelligence, a technology upon which the future of American economic and military supremacy rested.
It was a race, said Aschenbrenner, that would “determine the future of the free world.” The only question was whether the United States or its authoritarian adversary China would get there first.
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