Google’s AI struggles scream trouble as new Chinese models (again) throw US tech dominance into question
The Odyssey and the World Cup final. What a great Sunday. Today in tech, we’re discussing how China is chipping away at the US’s lead in the AI race and how Silicon Valley’s workers are taking action to protect their jobs from AI.
As Google falters on AI, China eats into the US’s lead
Google is struggling with the latest version of its Gemini model A Chinese company, Moonshot, put out a free, surprisingly capable model last week China’s new models yet again thrown the US dominance in AI into question
Google is months behind in its launch schedule for the new version of its flagship AI model, Gemini 3.5. According to Bloomberg, Google is attempting to improve Gemini’s coding abilities to catch up to Claude, the Anthropic bot that is widely considered the best AI coding tool. OpenAI released a new model at the start of July; Google had been expected to do the same in May. News of the delay sent Google’s shares sliding as investors questioned whether it could maintain its top position in the AI race.
A refreshed and newly capable Gemini might also have ameliorated the damage to the US’s reputation as the leader in AI this week – but didn’t.
As Google’s internal struggles became public, the Chinese startup Moonshot debuted an unexpectedly strong model, sending shivers through Silicon Valley and Washington DC alike. Moonshot’s Kimi K3 model featured surprisingly capable coding, particularly in a niche called “front-end coding”. “This may be the single biggest release of the year,” Anastasios Angelopoulos, the CEO of AI testing company Arena, said.
By Sunday night, Moonshot couldn’t keep up with the demand for its latest model. “Kimi K3 has received far more love than we expected, and our GPUs are feeling it. Over the past 48 hours, demand has pushed close to the limits of our current capacity,” the company posted on X.
Unlike ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini, Kimi K3 is free to use and open-weight, meaning anyone can download it and run it locally on their own computers, as its core components are released to the public.
It’s been the general strategy of Chinese AI companies: open-source and open-weight models, beating US AI companies on price as Chinese manufacturers do, and mirroring the broader trade war of the US and China. DeepSeek inspired a major US market panic last year. Alibaba previewed its latest model, Qwen3.8 Max, on Sunday, showing off a similar number of parameters as Kimi K3. The company plans to publish the model’s weights soon, per Bloomberg.
The strategy has been made possible by Beijing, which subsidizes computing resources and power consumption for its domestic AI startups, allowing them to release their AI models for free. The basic logic goes that if these startups can’t compete on capability with US models, they can compete on cost and undercut the US parent companies, which need to earn a profit eventually.
It’s all causing major headaches in Silicon Valley. There are no longtime incumbents in the AI business to whom customers will default. If those buyers, especially businesses who need lots of generated code, can turn to cheap or free alternatives, there might be little need to spend big on brand-name bots. The South China Morning Post, which is itself owned by the Alibaba Group, reported last week: “As US AI costs soar, global businesses pivot to China’s low-cost, open-weight models.”
In the US, nerves are rattling. Hawkish Trump administration officials are rekindling their efforts to block any US access to Chinese AI models via de facto bans, commerce department rules or an executive order, Axios reported Monday.
OpenAI’s policy head for advanced AI, former Donald Trump adviser Dean Ball, wrote that Beijing’s open-weight approach to AI would lead to “full AI communism” with government-run datacenters powering AI as a public good. He denounced that future. OpenAI has been sounding the alarm about Chinese models for years, which reads as part political disagreement and part business strategy, since Chinese open-weight models threaten OpenAI’s projected profits.
“I would guess that the Trump Administration will at some point realize that their best strategy here would be to create large amounts of regulatory risk around the use of open-weight Chinese models,” Ball wrote.
There is no alignment between the US’s leading AI companies and the government players in the same industry. Emil Michael, the US Pentagon’s chief technology officer, responded to Ball: “Every industry/ecosystem has its supreme village idiot. Dean Ball is that for AI.”
As Beijing presents a unified front, the White House’s response is growing more scattered by the day. Trump himself had talked until recently of complete deregulation and never restraining any AI investment, research or releases. By contrast, the White House is restricting access – even allies’ access – to Anthropic and OpenAI’s advanced cybersecurity models. Even the personnel are changing. Chris Fall, the director of the Trump administration’s Center for AI Standards and Innovation, is resigning just three months into his tenure, Axios reported Monday.
Not all of the AI crowd is against these models’ incursion on US dominance. Bill Gurley, a longtime venture capitalist best known for his early backing of Uber, wrote of China’s AI models in the Washington Post: “They aren’t a security threat – they’re what competition looks like.”
China’s advanced AI does pose a risk to the global business of AI, which is, as yet, still a race without a clear winner. Cheap Chinese AI models may trump their expensive US counterparts. The entire US economy is tied tight to the AI industry, raising the stakes of the Chinese models’ capabilities. Undercutting the US’s AI frontrunners’ business could unsettle the entire US stock market even more so than it already has.
That competition is set to play out in the future. In the present, though, China’s recent releases have thrown the politics of AI in the US into chaos. That reads as the bigger win.
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Silicon Valley’s workers are worried about what AI is doing to their jobs
Employees are taking some of the US’s first collective actions to protect their jobs from AI
Last week, Meta workers filed a lawsuit against their former employer alleging that it automated their firing via algorithmic decision-making. Meanwhile, thousands of Google’s workers petitioned their CEO for layoff protections as the company shifts its spending from employees to AI infrastructure.
“Make no mistake: this is a company that is enjoying massive, unprecedented success,” Parul Koul, a Google software engineer and the president of the Alphabet Workers Union, said outside the company’s California headquarters. “These layoffs and cuts are not difficult decisions, but simply profit being put over the people that make this company run.”
These Silicon Valley employees are making these moves against the backdrop of the AI boom, which is changing software engineering rapidly and causing unions to gain popularity.
A Meta employee who was part of a recent union drive in the UK said: “It’s about us having a voice in all of the operations of the company, from products to employee experience.”
Meta countered last week’s lawsuit with an unusually direct statement: “These claims lack merit and are not based on facts. Workforce management and organizational decisions were and are made by people, not AI.” Google did not issue a statement in response to last week’s petition.
We’ve seen Silicon Valley luminaries warn of futuristic apocalyptic scenarios, but we’re seeing those worries come to life among the fearful rank-and-file employees, who are now taking action. We’re witnessing how those workforces, who have a front-row seat to AI’s development, respond to its effects on their employment.
