Last Thursday, not long after the success of Chinese AI startup DeepSeek sent U.S. tech stocks into a freefall, OpenAI gathered some of Washington’s most influential AI policy thinkers and power brokers in a rented office space near Capitol Hill to sell them on the virtues of homegrown artificial intelligence.
DFD sat in the room alongside Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, Sen. Mike Rounds (R-S.D.) and Lynne Parker, a White House tech adviser, as CEO Sam Altman sought to convince his audience that OpenAI deserved Washington’s full support.
The DeepSeek news had come as a sharp rebuke to the company’s claims that it was leading the world in AI model performance, showing users that the Chinese could achieve similar results at a far lower price tag, without the need for mind-boggling computational power and cutting-edge chips.
