There is much to fear from artificial intelligence developed in China and handed to businesses and governments in the west almost free of charge.

Every month Chinese AI developers such as DeepSeek and Xiaomi dispatch the latest versions of their “open-weight” models that allow users to take the core software and use it without paying an expensive ongoing licence.

In Britain, we love cheap Chinese kit, usually setting aside any concerns about how it was made and who by.

The row over whether to allow Chinese electric cars unfettered access to British retail forecourts is a case in point. They are cheaper than other EVs sold in the UK and, consumers ask: What is not to like? These same consumers might consider how Chinese EVs are subsidised by Beijing deliberately to boost exports and, in so doing, undermine foreign domestic car industries.

Cheap AI takes this export threat to a higher level.

It’s scary because Beijing is entering a new phase in the long march of economic development, taking the world’s second largest economy closer to making China great again.

Go back 10 years and Xi Jinping’s close supporters were alert to the internal contradictions of a totalitarian, command and control state apparatus and how it could trigger social unrest, much as it did in the last century in Tiananmen Square.

A property crash that still acts as a drag on the economy, rising unemployment, poor health services in many regions, a mismatch of men and women, an ageing population – they could all be the spark that threatens Communist party rule.

Then came AI and the state discovered complete control.

Now Beijing has huge surveillance capabilities, using AI to capture images of its citizens and monitor their activities if they need to.

Don’t think it means Chinese people are under virtual house arrest. They can go about their daily lives, gathering in the street for an impromptu dance or to discuss how their local region might be better run. But serious dissidents? They are rooted out and sidelined, re-educated or punished.

For the central committee, AI is a blessing. While the financial constraints from having to please a domestic audience have not entirely disappeared, Beijing’s leaders can concentrate on the threats they face from the rest of the world.

Not that it wants to invade countries in the same manner as Russia. China’s reinvigorated belt and road initiative creates permanent channels for trade less obviously than the previous iteration, allowing Beijing to turn states into clients who depend for the basics of life on Chinese technology.

Where Russia is using AI to enhance cyber-attacks on European government agencies and businesses to create chaos, China wants merely to widen the circle of friends that consume its goods without asking awkward questions.

Military force is also being contemplated. Now that Beijing can redirect precious resources previously needed to subsidise Chinese consumers, it is building a fleet of warships to challenge the US in the Pacific, much as Japan did in the 1930s. Taiwan, the engine of semiconductor development, is in its sights.

Meanwhile, Chinese developers are launching AI models by the dozen each month at a fraction of the cost of US equivalents.

There are tech analysts who say Chinese models add to the rich tapestry of AI, supplementing the closed, proprietary models of OpenAI and Anthropic. And they say there are European and Indian versions in development. Adding to that tapestry, Meta is fast developing open AI models, but like the other challengers, lags in the race to win over customers.

In practice, an AI user has the choice between a cheap Chinese open system they can tweak for their own ends or expensive US software that comes with bells and whistles they probably don’t need.

Both types have the potential to destroy humanity, as many AI experts have documented. But on a more mundane level, in day-to-day use, only one comes with at least some effort to provide security and a benign intent, and it’s not the Chinese option.

As Ross Burley says, Chinese AI comes with extra baggage. Burley is director of the Centre for Information Resilience (CIR), an independent, non-profit group dedicated to, among other things, exposing human rights abuses and countering disinformation.

He says DeepSeek cannot access the properly isolated use of its software, “but that addresses just part of the risk. Running a model on your own servers doesn’t automatically remove any political censorship. Or indeed repair weaknesses in any security defences.”

An evaluation report by the US National Institute of Standards and Technology (Nist) found political censorship in downloaded DeepSeek models running on its own infrastructure, which means that hosting those models in the UK wouldn’t, by itself, remove censorship.

“We should be deeply concerned about embedding Beijing’s political restrictions into systems that businesses and public services rely on for information and decisions,” he says.

The policy governing DeepSeek’s online chatbot says it collects prompts and uploaded material, processes and stores personal data in China, and permits disclosure to Chinese authorities.

Michael Wooldridge, a professor of AI at the University of Oxford, says it is not unreasonable to assume data inputted into the chatbot could be shared with the Chinese state.

The consequences for policymaking are profound. The UK should reject the lure of cheap Chinese AI and seek to better tame US AI while supporting domestic and EU suppliers.

Relying on Chinese tech, from cars to AI, is going to hollow out industry and undermine the security of our data.