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Comment by tracker1 | Hacker News Reader

I think part of it is definitely to weaken US providers and the US economy as a whole. China has a completely different domestic economic structure and motivations from western cultures... it's probably closest to a fascist economy mixed with a Maoist cultural ideology behind it. There's definitely winners and losers and the state tends to have tight controls over everything though.

I also think the restrictions on OpenAI and Anthropic are somewhat short sighted. In that the guardrails dramatically limit efforts towards securing your own software in many ways. Yes, it's also "dangerous" and maybe there should be a means of identifying "domestic" or otherwise "secure" accounts for those allowed to use the models without the same guardrails in place.

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Does it weaken the US though? It weakens the big providers but most of the economy is in companies buying and this helps them save money.

Isn't most of the economy riding on the stock of these handful of companies though?

Most of the growth is. If we removed AI, the US would be in a severe recession right now. Most of the absolute market cap, employment, capital, and other metrics that are not directly coupled to growth paint a better distributed picture.

Of course, growth like this can only continue for so long without changing that.

> Isn't most of the economy riding on the stock of these handful of companies though?

No.

Well, yes, because the US government has staked the future of the country's GDP on AI. They're even divesting from science as a whole and putting it into data centers.

Saying that AI will drive the future GDP is a very different thing from saying an economy relies on the stock price of a few AI companies.

Okay but political leadership of the US are literally are staking the future of GDP on exactly those few AI companies... $1.4trillion so far while universal childcare would only cost $40 billion a year.

It's a sick joke.

> political leadership of the US are literally are staking the future of GDP on exactly those few AI companies... $1.4trillion so far

Can you explain where you get that number from?

The information I have:

a) The government took a nearly $9 billion stake in Intel to support its chip-making efforts.

b) The Pentagon took a $400 million equity stake in MP Materials, a rare-earth miner.

c) Sam Altman has advocated that the US government take equity stakes in AI companies. Sen Bernie Sanders wants the US government to take 50% stake in AI companies! Nothing has come of it though.

d) Defense department AI contract value rose to $90.7B in 2026.

So I'm super curious where you pulled that $1.4T number from.

Yes, it damages its image, this is further made evident given the amount of propaganda that follows each time. Why would you invest in claude or codex if you just read how China's stuff is better?

Image is not the economy. AI is a large part of the stock market, but a much smaller share of the economy.

GDP growth in the United States is in AI and healthcare. AI capital expenditure is around 5% of total US GDP. Housing right before the 2009 market collapse was around 6.7%.

Biggest issue I see is housing has more real value than AI expenditure. Demand is real and isn't based purely on a few companies valuation or marketing spin. Nearly 2 decades later we still haven't caught up to construction rates before the 2008 collapse. When the bubble pops it's going to really suck.

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