Can a state that suppresses intellectual freedom tolerate the open inquiry that AI innovation ultimately requires?

In the technology arms race between the United States and China for dominance in artificial intelligence (AI), we are often told that the decisive factor will be computational power: who can build more data centers, secure more advanced chips, and train larger models more cheaply. Those are not irrelevant, but nor are they the crux of the competition. The true contest is one of political culture.

China is scrambling, by state initiative in a command economy, to close the remaining gap with the West in generative AI and foundational tech research. Yet it does so under a one-party Leninist dictatorship whose defining feature is the suppression of free inquiry. That fact raises a paradox at the heart of the AI race: artificial intelligence, the most daring attempts ever made to replicate human cognition, seems to require precisely the qualities that authoritarianism must crush — independence of mind, criticism of orthodoxy, and the freedom to dissent.

To borrow Czesław Miłosz’s phrase, how can the captive mind create a technology characterized by relentless innovation and the overthrow of orthodoxies? How can conceptual daring flourish in an environment where thought is ruthlessly policed?

For decades, those who understood communism predicted that the Soviet economy must fail not only for want of market economic calculation but for want of intellectual freedom — and fall behind the West in advanced technology.

Fail it did, partly in the effort to save the system by loosening the totalitarian grip. China is different, we are told. Yet China’s selective experiments with markets have been accompanied, now, by even tighter enforcement of ideological conformity, with Xi Jinping repeatedly warning against a Soviet-type “disaster” (i.e., perestroika and glasnost).

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