If the US wants to “fight” China, it should start with a 5 year plan for open source. Here’s why.

Open source is how China built alternatives to US tech after Huawei was cut off. It’s how they scale R&D for free. When DeepSeek released its model, thousands of global developers started building on it instantly. And all this started with a 5 year open source national plan in 2021.

The US model concentrates AI power in a few giant companies. The Chinese model spreads it everywhere. Open source means any factory, any hospital, any small business can use the tech for free. They treat AI as economic infrastructure instead of a profit engine. There’s a geopolitical angle too. When the world adopts Chinese open source, Chinese standards become the default.

China also uses open source to train its developers at scale. Students don’t learn from outdated textbooks anymore. They contribute to live code used by millions. In April 2025, China launched a national policy to evaluate students based on code commits. Companies like Huawei publish real problems for students to solve. When they graduate, they’re already productive.

The results speak for themselves. By 2019, many Chinese enterprises already use open source. But after US sanctions, they went all in. By 2025, open-source AI adoption hit  60% in key sectors, and the government at 95%. China now accounts for nearly 30% of global open-source AI usage, surpassing the US in model downloads.

This applies to grassroot developers as well. A factory worker in Shenzhen can learn from the same code a Google engineer uses. A teenager in Chengdu can fix a bug in a project used by hospitals across Brazil. The barrier to entry is zero.

China has many national plan, industrial metaverse is another mind blowing one. And as much as it takes on the “socialism” and “state mandates”, capitalism plays a major role.  

So if America wants to compete, stop treating open source like a charity, and start treating it like a strategy.