Our AI, Your Problem

PARIS— In 1971, US Treasury Secretary John Connally famously told European finance ministers that the dollar was “our currency, but your problem.” The Nixon administration had just suspended the greenback’s convertibility into gold, and the rest of the world had no choice but to absorb the shock. That is what happens when the global economy runs on a currency that most countries do not control and cannot influence.

The same logic is apparent in the global adoption of new generative AI tools. European companies increasingly run on AI systems whose price, availability, and rules are set in the United States or China. On one side are leading Chinese models, most of which are open-weight, improving fast, and startlingly cheap. DeepSeek’s V4 Flash, for example, costs roughly $0.14 per million input tokens, compared with $3 for a comparable US model. No wonder the share of tokens used by US companies on Chinese models (through OpenRouter) has skyrocketed from under 10% in early 2025 to 45% as of July.