The launch of Deepseek has been framed as the AI race’s Sputnik but the timing is dubious and questions are being asked about whether the tech is really as game-changing as its creators claim. Either way, America must stay vigilant, says Mark Minevich

It started with a single, seismic headline: China builds an AI model for just $6m.

The claim seemed almost too bold to be true. In an era where Western AI giants pour billions into training their latest large language models (LLMs), the number felt impossible – an engineered disruption, a bombshell lobbed directly at the heart of Silicon Valley’s AI dominance.

At the centre of the storm: Liang Wenfeng, the enigmatic founder of Deepseek, China’s rising........

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