Who wants to buy the genetic code of 14 million Westerners? DNA sequencing company 23andMe has filed for bankruptcy protection and is now up for sale. Users are now being advised to delete their accounts, though for many this advice arguably comes too late. But the real privacy concern should be the geopolitical one. In this context, the potential sale of millions of DNA sequences, most of them American, could sharpen a burgeoning debate in the US tech industry over which, if any, national loyalties Silicon Valley should espouse.

Founded in 2006 by Anne Wojcicki and two partners, 23andMe offers consumers the opportunity to send a saliva sample for sequencing, and receive a report on ancestry and health information. Despite celebrity endorsements and a valuation of $6 billion after listing in 2021, the company has never made a profit and is now seeking a buyer.

So, what will happen to its databases? 23andMe always emphasised its trustworthiness on data protection. But when it went public, privacy experts raised concerns over the increased number of shareholders with possible interests in bending the firm’s privacy rules to access its data. Last month, the undercover media outlet O’Keefe Media Group published a video conversation with a US Treasury advisor, who warned that the firm shares its data with shareholding companies, some of which are — he claims — owned by the Russian or Chinese governments.

Even if this is speculation, the firm’s own data policy states that, in the event of sale or bankruptcy, customers’ data is a saleable asset. California’s Attorney General has now advised anyone who has used the service to delete their account and data, and, if their saliva sample was stored, to request it be destroyed before the company is sold. But around 80% of 23andMe users have already consented to their DNA being used in research. And as one reporter noted after using the service, users who have given this consent cannot later revoke it. While the firm promised that data for medical research was only ever made available in anonymised form, whether this will remain the case is anyone’s guess. As a consumer-facing firm, 23andMe traded on its trustworthiness. Should its buyer start trading with businesses rather than individuals, all the incentives on privacy will flip, with the dataset more valuable the less privacy is afforded the individuals whose data it contains.

But what if the real concern isn’t individual privacy but national security? For while we are surely well into the age of Big Data and biotech, every day also brings a new headline underlining the fact that this is occurring in tandem with a return to great-power politics. Based on where it ships, 23andMe serves, in essence, wealthy, tech-curious consumers in the West: America and her allies. It’s not hard to imagine a hostile regime acquiring its database with malicious intentions, such as bioweapon development.

In his new book The Technological Republic, Palantir CEO Alex Karp critiques what he views as a naively universalist outlook in the US tech industry, as though global peace and transnational commerce are somehow guaranteed, forever. Karp disagrees, arguing instead that the American tech industry must abandon its squeamishness about defence, and urgently refocus on the national interest.

Was 23andMe an instance of such naive universalism? Doubtless Wojcicki only ever thought of 23andMe’s dataset in commercial, win-win terms: a source of benefits all round, whether from research, customised healthcare, or personal profit. A hostile polity exploiting a database containing millions of complete American genomes to as yet unimaginable military ends would have seemed like science fiction only a few years ago. But if Karp is right, this is no longer so far-fetched. Perhaps the real questions for any potential 23andMe buyer should not concern business intentions, but national loyalties.

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Mary Harrington is a contributing editor at UnHerd.

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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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