The Approaching AI Wars
By Todd Davis
Newly inaugurated President Donald Trump issued so many declarations, promises, and executive orders during his first two weeks in office that it was nearly impossible to keep track of what the new Administration was planning. Trump unleashed a political blitzkrieg designed to overwhelm his opposition, buoy goodwill among his supporters, and send messages to allies and enemies on the global stage. Lost in the offensive was the formation of Stargate, a joint venture between the US Government and leading Tech Companies; Oracle, SoftBank, and OpenAI. With initial funding amounting to $100 billion and further expansion planned to bring the project investment north of $500 billion, Stargate will rival the Manhattan Project in terms of intellectual and financial investment.
Stargate, like the Manhattan Project, will also propel the world across a new filter, where once there was a pre-atomic era then a nuclear age from which humanity can never go back, so too will this transform Earth from a pre-corporate AI to a post-corporate AI world. As if to unconsciously emphasize that point, mere days after Stargate was announced, the Chinese AI model DeepSeek was unveiled to the world. DeepSeek immediately became a competitive rival to OpenAI’s CHATGBT and stunned the Tech Industry when it was revealed that the development of the Chinese model had only cost around $6 million. Ramifications were felt immediately as Nvidia, the primary driver behind US AI technology, lost nearly $600 million in market share.
Before Stargate
Consolidating intellectual and financial resources into Stargate represents a radical departure from current AI development within the United States. Stargate will be a real event horizon for humanity. Current AI research is fragmented and has largely been driven by academia, start-ups, and public sector funding. This approach has led to small-scale projects aimed at enhancing user experiences or making life easier for humans. Regulatory frameworks can partially influence AI development in the current model.
AI adoption has been steadily gaining in the country but has not been transformative on a global scale. Core institutions like healthcare, education, and public infrastructure have remained untouched or underdeveloped by AI automation and intelligence. AI has been seen, and used, as an augmentative tool. For the public that generally has meant using CHATGBT as an extremely advanced search engine or writing term papers for college students. Within the business sector, AI has been used to streamline processes, automate repetitive tasks, and enhance decision-making.
Ethical considerations around AI in this limited capacity have been raised by many, including Elon Musk who has called for a pause in AI development. Regulations and committees should be formed to determine the potential ramifications of the technology that we won’t be able to walk away from once implemented. The consequences of AI misuse are understood but not fully realized in the real world.
After Stargate
With a $500 billion investment, AI will become as fundamental to society as electricity, the internet, or the industrial revolution. It might underlie every critical system, from healthcare and national defense to resource management and communication. Stargate will fundamentally change American society.
The Stargate project shifts power toward corporate development where a few large companies; OpenAI, Oracle, and their partners, will both dictate the future of AI research and application while reaping the vast benefit of the rewards. Small start-ups and academic institutions will be buried the same way Walmart eliminated local hardware and grocery stores.
Introducing advanced AI systems into the economy will result in widespread automation of jobs, forcing companies to adapt at unprecedented speeds. Entire industries will be transformed, from logistics and manufacturing to legal services and creative fields. Hundreds of thousands of jobs will be eliminated. AI automation will do to white-collar jobs what globalization of industry did to blue-collar jobs.
Vast automation driven by Stargate will displace jobs faster than we can adapt, leading to widespread unrest, inequality, and systemic collapse. Mass unemployment combined with inadequate social safety nets will create chaos within American society. Some will prosper, many won’t.
Corporate AI that is tied into a government project also supercharges privacy concerns. Monetization strategies often rely on data harvesting, surveillance, and manipulation to maximize revenue. Advanced AI will optimize this process like nothing we have ever seen. What does this mean practically? More invasive targeting for advertising. Behavioral manipulation at an unprecedented scale. Exploitation of vulnerable and dissenting populations. If the government is acting as a partner to Stargate, it will be less inclined to regulate AI and will pressure them the same way the Biden Administration did with Google, Facebook, and Twitter to drive the narrative it wants expressed.
Global AI Arms Race
Competition between Stargate and DeepSeek for AI supremacy will push the United States and China into developing more advanced systems without fully considering safety or ethical consequences. The idea that the first to apply AI to military technology that will dominate the future battlefields on land, air, and sea will be all-consuming.
As AI development accelerates into a full-scale research war between American corporations and China’s DeepSeek, the global landscape will undergo seismic and unpredictable changes in economics, warfare, governance, and social structures. This rivalry will likely mirror Cold War-era tensions but will play out in cyberspace, finance, and defense. Everything and anything will be on the table in the quest for technological supremacy. Red lines will be crossed based on national security. Dissenting opinions will be labeled as pro-Chinese talking points or CCP propaganda.
American tech giants Google DeepMind, OpenAI, Microsoft, Oracle, Amazon, and Meta will invest trillions to counter DeepSeek. Regulation will be ignored or removed. Everything will be justified in a race to beat the Chinese. There will be no ethical standards applied to AI in the rapid push for new-generation use and application. Vice President J.D. Vance said as much during the recent Paris AI Summit.
The Trump administration, believes that AI will have countless revolutionary applications in economic innovation, job creation, national security, health care, free expression and beyond, and to restrict its development now will not only unfairly benefit incumbents in this space, it would mean paralyzing one of the most promising technologies we have seen in generations.
The U.S. and Chinese governments will subsidize AI development, recognizing its potential for strategic dominance in cybersecurity, intelligence, and economic power. Both nations will deploy AI for financial market predictions, supply chain optimizations, and autonomous infrastructure to gain an economic edge. Vance again,
We believe that excessive regulation of the AI sector could kill a transformative industry just as it’s taking off, and we’ll make every effort to encourage pro-growth AI policies, and I’d like to see that deregulatory flavour making its way into a lot of the conversations at this conference.
The Vice President is pushing unfettered AI development. A wild west atmosphere where anything is permissible if it provides an edge over China. As a result, AI-related espionage will increase. Hackers, state-backed cyber units, and corporate spies infiltrating AI projects to steal cutting-edge algorithms, quantum computing progress, and proprietary large-scale models. The US Military, likely Space Force, and its Chinese equivalent will have specialized formations dedicated to AI acquisition and defense.
AI Becomes the Backbone of Power
After this initial development phase, the US and China will apply the lessons learned from drone warfare in the Ukraine War on an unprecedented scale. Drones will no longer be guided via FPV with PS5 controllers. Complex AI systems will coordinate drone offensive and defensive deployments. AI will be used in cyberwarfare and strategic decision-making. Hunter-killer drones will begin to be used by our already militarized police departments.
Meanwhile, AI-powered financial models will dominate global markets, making real-time trading decisions at speeds beyond human comprehension. All those hedge fund jobs? Gone. Consolidated into a handful of investment banks that were likely tied into the Stargate circle and were the first to automate.
Both Chinese and American society will undergo surveillance and control at an unprecedented scale. The pop culture phrase “Who watches the Watchmen?” will be answered – AI. Only it will be watching us. Introduction of a Minority Report predictive nature AI that flags individuals for “pre-crimes” isn’t unrealistic at this stage. Advanced behavioral AI will manipulate the American and Chinese people, using vast data to predict and shape public opinion.
Since AI development and application require vast sums of money for research and enormous energy output to power the servers required to run AI systems, the world will be bifurcated into the haves and have-nots. We will be looking at a post-modern version of 19th-century Colonialism. Power and resources will be consolidated within American and Chinese spheres of influence driven by dominant AI tech. That will leave the rest of the world looking like something from District 12 in the Hunger Games.
Event Horizon and Irreversibility
Once humanity crosses the Stargate threshold acceleration becomes unstoppable. The scale of investment, development, and adoption will make it impossible to pause or reverse the progress of AI, even if serious risks emerge. Society will adapt to an AI-centric world, expecting automated solutions for every problem. The line between human and machine contributions would blur permanently.
Society will fundamentally transform. Even if there isn’t a Terminator franchise type of takeover by a SkyNet AI entity, our role as humans will forever be changed. Many philosophical questions reflect on the purpose and nature of humanity. What is our role as humans if AI-driven machines can outperform us at most tasks? What does that do to our sense of self-worth as a species? Descartes rationalized the pinnacle of human consciousness as “I think, therefore I am.” We as humans have long regarded our ability to think, rationalize, and plan as the major differentiation between our species and everything else on the planet. What happens when that is replaced by AI? How do we preserve creativity, autonomy, and meaning?
An Inevitable Outcome?
Corporations won’t be able to slow down AI advancement. The tantalizing rewards will push aside all risk assessment, even catastrophic risk. The US and China will exploit AI for short-term national gains creating an endless loop. AI will become increasingly unpredictable, maybe even autonomous because we have no idea what it will become or how it will evolve. Regulations will be non-existent. Both nations will accept and rationalize catastrophic risks in AI development as necessary to stay ahead of the other.
The Pandora’s Box this opens reads like a modern guide to the Apocalypse; economic collapse as millions of jobs are lost creating unfathomable wealth disparity, cyberwarfare, and military AI-driven conflicts. AI will infiltrate every aspect of our society at a frighteningly fast rate. Despite this, neither China nor the US will slow down. They will be incapable of pausing or halting AI development because slowing down equals losing to the other. Both will push forward, even if it leads to their destruction.
An AI arms race will be sold to Americans as the way to the future. AI will be propagandized with billions behind it, it will become the largest lobby in the world, bigger than AIPAC or Big Pharma. Democrats will pretend the NRA is still a threatening lobby even when Stargate is thousands of times larger. Republicans seem to have already embraced a brake-free AI world. The AI arms race will be sold as a positive, a step toward development and a better future. In reality, this technology doesn’t only threaten our national security, it threatens the continuity of human civilization itself.
