The heads of major Western news agencies and media outlets, including the Associated Press, Agence France Press, Reuters and CNN, joined Chinese news agency Xinhua and its Russian counterpart TASS onstage at the World Media Summit in Beijing to speak about the importance of journalistic values and the fight against disinformation.
At face value, this gathering appears somewhat odd. What are major Western media groups doing in China debating the liberal underpinnings of press freedom together with organisations that operate in an ecosystem that by definition isn’t free? Not only is there a geopolitical stand-off between the United States and China, but Western democracies (and Europe in particular) are engaged in a dangerous deadlock with Russia over its invasion of Ukraine, in which the nation led by Vladimir Putin is accused of being a major agent of disruption via psyops and the weaponisation of information ecosystems. One potential hypothesis is that it is tied to the proliferation and adoption of Artificial Intelligence, which was one of the key issues at the summit being held in Beijing.
While there is a clear discrepancy between how the Western powers and China and Russia see how journalism should work, both sides are connected by the need to see the AI era organised under a set of rules that leading AI labs mainly from the United States are fighting against.
For the media giants, leading Artificial Intelligence labs embody a major existential threat, given their intermediation in the access to news. Whereas the digital revolution broke the media’s business model by aggregating and monetising its content on its own terms, the AI era promises to take them out of the picture completely by giving end users a fully functional output without ever sending the audience back to the original source. The massive adoption of ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and the rest of the leading chatbots are creating a direct line of communication between the reader and information and – whether or not the news is accurate – it is doing so without the media’s active and direct involvement. Not only were the AI models trained on the open Internet, crawling a vast amount of information including copyrighted pages without consent, but also in their outputs they are retrieving, editorialising, and spewing out responses that include the news. The demise of the traditional model for journalistic consumption is only accelerating.
For the sovereign antagonists of the US and Europe, the AI race has become the new arms race. At the centre of it is China, the only country in the world keeping up with the development of AI technology coming out of the US. Chinese firms are near the frontier and have the capital and talent to keep on the toes of the Silicon Valley labs. From Deepseek to Alibaba, they are investing heavily in the development of models and infrastructure to stay close to OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and the rest of them. Russia is in a whole other ballpark – with no capacity to compete in the AI arms race, they are mere supporting actors. Involved in a major military operation in the context of their invasion of Ukraine, Russia is in the thick of it both with the digital and real world ramifications of the eruption of AI. Drone warfare has come to dominate the battlefield and the use of AI in those and essentially every other element of war has become a defining factor. Yet Russia has emerged as a major player in the information ecosystem, with active involvement in psychological operations worldwide, meaning that dominating the new and evolving suite of AI tools will be key to maintaining its leverage on the global geopolitical table.
From the perspective of those present in Beijing, the standard worldview is very different from what is heard in the West. There is deep scepticism about the United States’ global leadership and Europe is once again seen as the “sick man.” Amongst a crowd that clearly sympathises with something different, the US is considered on the verge of an economic and political crisis. The AI bubble could pop any day, bringing down with it the US and global economy, further exacerbating the structural weaknesses facing the major superpower. At the same time, Donald Trump’s leadership generates domestic tensions that threaten the stability of the democratic system both in the US and across its regions of influence, as right-wing political movements generate disruption. Europe is stagnant economically and recessive demographically, and faces major immigration and productivity issues. With the US beginning to withdraw military support, it faces the difficult issue of having to increase its defence budgets in the face of a social crisis where the population isn’t finding responses from its leadership.
Many in Beijing predict the impending doom of the Western model. It is probably more a consequence of desire than of pure deductive reasoning, but it is clear that the current brand of globalised, financialised capitalism is generating structural tensions that threaten its enduring existence. It is also difficult to imagine what will break the current cycle of uneven economic growth and concentration of riches and capital. While these are serious threats for the Western model, by no means does it presage a Golden Age for its contenders. China will continue its ascent as it grows its market share of the global economy, but still faces a systemic interdependence with the United States and the need to build a robust domestic economic system. Russia, for its part, has consolidated the hegemony of Putin but remains constrained by sanctions and will continue to be cut off from the international financial system. It retains the military might, but has been relegated on the world stage given its lack of technological innovation.
Argentina is very far from this whole debate. As the political elites continue to battle each other over failed economic models, the world moves on. While Javier Milei promises to create an AI paradise, the country has limited infrastructure and human capital. It is engaged in historic and futile “culture wars” as the political ecosystem continues to debate the rift between opposition leaders Cristina Fernández de Kirchner and Axel Kicillof. There are doubts as to how much support Milei can expect from Trump after his defeat by the Democrats in recent midterm elections, and whether the relationship with Brazil will be acrimonious given the verbal war with Lula.
The vicissitudes of a medium-sized, peripheral nation appear small when the global context is taken into account.
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