Missouri senator Josh Hawley warned today that AI will create a caste system in America.

In one of his most forceful attacks yet on Silicon Valley, the Republican argued that unchecked advances in AI technology would hand unprecedented power to a small elite while hollowing out America’s working class.

Speaking at the National Conservatism conference in Washington DC, Hawley warned that the country risks a future in which truckers, cashiers and entry-level professionals are pushed aside by machines. At the same time, the “tech barons” who built them would amass wealth and influence beyond anything seen before. “The most powerful people in America will be more powerful than ever,” he said. “We will find ourselves facing a new kind of caste system — genetically modified, ‘perfect’ humans ruling over the imperfect ones, all with the help of the most powerful technology yet known to man.”

The senator, one of Congress’s most outspoken critics of Big Tech, accused leading AI companies of cloaking their ambitions in lofty rhetoric while pursuing what he described as a “transhumanist ideology” — a belief that technology can allow humans to transcend their limits, even mortality itself. To illustrate his point, Hawley invoked the Epic of Gilgamesh and Aldous Huxley, saying that the pursuit of immortality has always been a temptation that ends in ruin.  “For ancient auditors, the moral of Gilgamesh was plain,” he said. “Our humanity is joined to our mortality; our dignity is bound up with our frailty.”

Hawley warned that advances in automation could soon eliminate millions of jobs, citing estimates that half of entry-level white-collar positions could disappear within five years. Self-driving trucks, he added, would imperil the livelihoods of millions more across the transportation sector. “Where exactly are the new jobs supposed to come from?” he asked. “Sweeping floors in data centers? Mining rare earths in Greenland? What exactly is the future they’re [tech elites] promising?”

The senator has already introduced several AI-focused bills, and last month said that he was starting an investigation into Meta’s generative AI products and whether they posed harms to children. In his position as chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on Crime and Counterterrorism, Hawley called on Meta to turn over documents related to a report that said Meta had allowed AI bots to have “sensual” and “romantic” conversations with children.

Today, he called for sweeping reforms to rein in the technology, including new property rights over personal data, tighter guardrails around children’s use of AI, and stricter oversight of how the systems are deployed in the workplace. Hawley also urged reserving certain roles exclusively for people — from driving to providing medical advice — to prevent what he sees as a dangerous erosion of human responsibility. “AI should serve human beings, not the other way around,” he argued.

“Those who try to transcend their humanity risk losing it altogether, and enslaving everyone around them,” Hawley warned. “Our frailties teach us humility. Our limits make us free. That is the American way. Let’s keep it so.”

China is trying to catch up with America on artificial intelligence. The Wall Street Journal has reported that Zhipu AI — one of China’s six “AI tiger” LLMs — has released a new model that can rival leading US systems, including Anthropic’s Mythos, in cybersecurity tasks such as pinpointing security bugs. While this marks a milestone in China’s drive to catch up with Western AI capabilities, strong performance on a single benchmark does not mean it has taken the lead. Chinese models still lag behind their Western counterparts in broader capabilities, such as autonomous operation. Skepticism is therefore warranted before resorting to hysterical conclusions, but complacency about the geopolitical implications of China’s AI advances would be an even greater mistake.

On the infrastructure side, Chinese AI is still constrained by access to advanced chips, with American labs way ahead in computing capacity as well as investment. Analysis from earlier this year suggests that Chinese models are likely to be at least a few months behind those in the US. But they are still continuing to make progress, or that the geopolitical importance of AI will be decided only by whose LLM has ventured deeper into the technological frontier. The practical applications of AI, countries’ to capture foreign markets, and the application of AI into the real economy will matter just as much.

Here, China may hold an advantage. As with its dominance across many critical supply chains, Beijing may not need to produce the most advanced AI systems — only those that are affordable and widely deployable. In doing so, it could consolidate global influence by supplying functional, low-cost AI at scale.

Beijing seems to be pursuing exactly that path, developing an AI “open-source” strategy that offers affordable, widely available AI models for companies and individuals to use and modify as they wish. The production of the DeepSeek AI model, which matched the performance of Silicon Valley tools such as ChatGPT at a fraction of the cost for users, created goodwill among Chinese models with developers.

The four most popular models on OpenRouter, an AI hardware platform for developers, are now all Chinese. The goal for China is not only to win the frontier-model race, but to make its systems the default layer of AI adoption across industries and global markets. For most economies, the choice is increasingly between an affordable tool they can deploy now and a more robust one that may be out of reach.

And while the countries adopting Chinese models may be exposed to political pressure and cyber threats from Beijing, safer and more capable alternatives matter little if they are unaffordable. American AI companies are already under pressure to monetize products whose operating costs are rising. If Chinese open-source models become the cheap default for startups, universities, governments and businesses across the developing world, then America’s AI lead will be eroded from below.

Perhaps more concerning for America in the long run is how AI can give Chinese manufacturing even more strength, through the ongoing integration of AI as a general-purpose technology. China’s new Five-Year Plan mentioned AI more than 50 times and includes an “AI+” action plan aimed at spreading AI across the economy.

Beijing has been pioneering automation of its critical infrastructure for years, with promising recent results in increasing warplane production capacity. In that regard, China’s open-model strategy and manufacturing dominance will reinforce each other. Cheap, adaptable models accelerate deployment across the real economy while those deployments generate real-world data and use cases that can feed back into further model improvement.

The United States should not dismiss the importance of its lead in the AI race. That lead worries Beijing, not least because a more automated Chinese economy would also become more vulnerable to AI-generated cyber threats. But nor should Washington assume that China cannot catch up with American capabilities over time.

This AI competition represents part of a broader struggle over tech supply chains and geopolitical influence. Decisions over whether to adopt US or Chinese models could produce a more fragmented global reality, with different regions relying on different cloud providers, chips and security structures. The result will likely be a global economy which is divided into competing spheres, rather than one which produces a single winner.

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Miquel Vila is a political and geopolitical risk consultant focusing on industrial strategy, critical infrastructure and global supply chains.

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