This news was enough to cause a rout amongst global stock markets yesterday morning following a similar meltdown on Wall Street on Monday. Two Chinese companies, Moonshot and Alibaba, released AI models that ranked with the most advanced American systems, competing directly with the giant US tech companies like Google. Last year, stock markets suffered a crash when a tiny Chinese artificial intelligence company, DeepSeek, produced a powerful AI model at a fraction of the cost of similar American models. Then, $1 trillion was wiped off the value of America’s leading tech companies. Now, with this latest development, the stranglehold that is vital not just to the multi-billionaire owners of America’s tech companies but the entire US economy, has been broken.