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Much of the discourse around China's AI capabilities compared to America's, especially after the release of Kimi K3, seems less about how America can keep up and more about how China can be slowed down. Obviously, this is not new; America has withheld chips in fear that China will use them to build better AI than the United States.

America wants to maintain its lead not only by attempting to outperform other countries, but also by hindering those it cannot. Of course, America is not a monolith. Many entrepreneurs have openly spoken out against the intentional actions America has taken to slow China down, including the refusal to export chips there.

There is obviously a genuine concern about American safety in a world where it might have to live at the mercy of another powerful country. No amount of moralism can convince anyone to exchange their American passport for one from Libya, Iraq, or anywhere else, really. But haven't we outgrown this whole nation-state concept? Do we still have to pretend there is some sort of resource scarcity we must all compete for, even while we have people worth billions of dollars—dollars that we simply print out of thin air anyway? Should we keep pretending that the starving children in Gaza are starving because we have to compete for available food? We can confidently agree by now that global scarcity is not the result of a lack of resources, natural or otherwise, but rather a blind worship of this god we call competition. We are killing ourselves just to reinforce the idea that we are winning. Winning is for losers.

The faction within America that believes in competition as a race for its own sake is the exact group that believes the future can only be good with America on top. They are obsessed with winning this illusion they call a race. In reality, a future where China can push its own system to make the best of AI could include the eradication of disease, solutions for climate change, and a plan for colonizing the next planet. But to this mindset, these vital goals for our species are only acceptable if America leads the way. This way of thinking is literally responsible for all the lives lost to war since World War II.

This broken mindset is exactly why people have falsely misunderstood Charles Darwin's great work on the characteristics of life, twisting his observations into one of the worst origin stories humans have ever invented. Competitive evolution is a mental illness.