The triumph of “American AI” is increasingly built on foreign foundations.

When a celebrated U.S. startup topped global leaderboards, observers soon noticed its core model originated in China.

This is no anomaly. Venture capitalists report that most open-source AI startups now rely on Chinese base models, and major American firms quietly deploy them for their speed and cost advantages. Beneath the rhetoric of an existential tech race, the U.S. AI ecosystem has become deeply dependent on Chinese foundations.

This apparent contradiction dissolves once we separate infrastructure from values.

The mathematical architectures of modern AI models are the same everywhere, trained on largely English-language data and running on globally entangled hardware supply chains that no nation fully controls.

Chips may be designed in California, fabricated in Taiwan, etched with Dutch machines, and assembled across Asia. Nothing about this stack is meaningfully national.

What is national, however, is the layer of values imposed after training.

Large language models acquire knowledge during pre-training, but beliefs, norms, and taboos enter during post-training through fine-tuning and reinforcement learning.

This is where ideology appears. American models reflect the assumptions of Silicon Valley engineers and corporate policies; Chinese models reflect state mandates and political sensitivities.

We see the consequences of this when models are asked about censored historical events. Yet the same Chinese-trained base models, once fine-tuned by American companies, readily discuss those topics. The values are portable, even if the “bones” are not!

And so the debate over AI sovereignty goes on. Full national control over infrastructure is a fantasy, but control over values is already happening by states in China, corporations in the U.S., and regulators in Europe.

A fourth option is emerging: user sovereignty. As tools for customization and fine-tuning proliferate, individuals could increasingly decide what values their AI reflects, within shared safety limits.

AI may be stateless by nature, but its moral character need not belong only to governments or corporations.

Key Topics:

• Deep Cogito: A Triumph of American AI? (00:24)

• Where Values Enter the Machine (04:10)

• The Tiananmen Test (07:56)

• The Stateless Infrastructure (10:46)

• Europe’s Different Question (14:37)

• The Case for User Sovereignty (17:08)

• The Safety Objection and its Limits (19:49)

• The Strange Convergence (21:45)

• Whose AI? (23:39)

More info, transcripts, and references can be found at ⁠⁠⁠⁠ethical.fm