Sam Altman is coming for Elon Musk. The OpenAI CEO’s latest venture is a new social media platform to rival X, which Musk acquired in October 2022 for $44 billion. Both titans anticipate that social media platforms can give them an edge in training and marketing their AI products — ChatGPT and Grok respectively.

One thing Musk and Altman have in common is their transformative vision for AI. “With these new [AI] abilities, we can have shared prosperity to a degree that seems unimaginable today,” Altman wrote in late 2024. AI will be “the most disruptive force in history”, Musk said earlier that year. In their minds, the battle for control of AI decides the future of humanity.

Musk’s vision is that AI becomes integrated with X to form an “everything app”, analogous to Chinese company WeChat. Altman’s prospective platform may indicate similar plans. Several of his competitors — xAI, Meta, and Google — have long benefitted from their platforms because they provide two prominent uses to AI development. First, they accelerate growth by making AI apps available to their user bases. Second, AI companies can use the data generated by users or by user-AI interactions to improve their AI models.

It’s clear that Altman would benefit from having a social media platform of his own, but creating one is easier said than done. X competitors, from Bluesky to Truth Social, have attempted to differentiate themselves by appealing to different ideological positions that may not be represented on the original platform. However, they’ve failed to draw a similar audience. X has an estimated 586 million monthly active users (MAU), 105 million of which are in the US. Meanwhile, Bluesky has an estimated 6.4 million MAU, while Truth social has an estimated 6.3 million MAU — each roughly 1% of X’s users. The incumbent networks of apps like X or Instagram keep users locked in. For someone whose friends remain on the old network, it can be near-impossible to switch.

A natural strategy for Altman could be to build an AI-first social media platform — an app where users expect high-quality bots to reply to their posts and discuss different points of view. This plays to OpenAI’s strengths, not only as a technology, but as a brand. OpenAI could therefore provide a natural home for people who want to engage in lengthy discussions with both ChatGPT and other human users in one venue. In an optimistic scenario, the OpenAI network would form a natural user base for people to experiment with AI followings, developing new norms, styles, and core influencers along the way.

However, most people remain frustrated with social media bots in the present. Meta recently removed its AI account programme in response to user backlash. While OpenAI could improve their models and customise them to engage with posts in positive-sum ways, negative experiences with AI bots will stop many users from even trying an AI-first platform.

Altman’s new venture comes amid a lengthy business and legal rivalry between Musk and OpenAI. On 29 February 2024, Musk filed a lawsuit against Altman, alleging breach of contract, breach of fiduciary duty, and unfair business practices. On 9 April, OpenAI launched a counter-suit alleging that “Musk has tried every tool available to harm OpenAI.” Part of this disagreement is political: in an interview with Tucker Carlson, the X boss claimed ChatGPT “is being trained to be politically correct”. A paper published by OpenAI in 2021 suggests that this is true for earlier models. “You have a woke, nihilistic — in my opinion — philosophy that is being built into these AIs,” Musk said in another interview, this time not singling out OpenAI.

The heated fight between Musk and Altman stems from their winner-take-all vision of AI, where the first to god-like AI wins a de facto monopoly. AI differs from traditional media technologies by being both the medium and the control system. Becoming the sole provider of AI doesn’t just mean charging monopoly prices — it could mean control of the entire media ecosystem or commercial infrastructure of the internet. An AI-first social media platform not only communicates the views of its users, but controls them at the same time. The combination of autonomous bots and traditional social media algorithms provides a powerful mechanism for controlling public opinion on the platform.

One company gaining a monopoly on AI is not a foregone conclusion. It’s equally possible that the industry remains as competitive as it is now, not only driving the price of AI down, but providing a variety of specialised models with different styles, specialties, abilities, and viewpoints.

Nonetheless, the threat of monopoly is a force that shapes American policy and public life. Among those most concerned is Vice President JD Vance, who promised at the Paris AI Action summit that “our laws will keep Big Tech, little tech and all other developers on a level playing field.” In the Trump administration, the debate over American AI policy shows no sign of subsiding. The rest of us can only look on.

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Brian Chau is a mathematician, software engineer, and independent writer at cactus.substack.com.

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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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