China does not need to build better AI than America. It needs to make American AI unprofitable. The playbook is older than the technology. Flood the market with a cheaper version until the domestic industry collapses. China ran it with steel. Ran it with solar. Ran it with semiconductors. Not a better product. A cheaper one. Good enough at a fraction of the price beats best in class at full cost. AI is next. Open-weight models. Lightweight. Inexpensive. Already inside a third of corporations. Not because they outperform. Because a CFO looked at the benchmark gap, looked at the price gap, and made the only decision capitalism allows. The rational one. China’s weapon is not Chinese technology. It is American capitalism. The market has no loyalty. No patriotism. Only price sensitivity. Every procurement decision is a vote, and the vote always goes to the invoice. American AI companies are valued on one assumption. That corporations will keep paying premium prices for premium intelligence. China’s strategy is to make that assumption false. Not by outbuilding. By undercutting. Creating value and capturing value have never been the same thing. AI might be the first technology powerful enough to prove it at civilizational scale. Roughly 40% of the S&P is tied to the AI bet. The majority of recent GDP growth has come from AI capital expenditure. America concentrated everything into a single sector and left that sector’s economics undefended. The distance between AI boom and American recession is one quarter where enough CFOs make the same rational decision at the same time. The technology race was the distraction. Who has the biggest model, who wins the benchmark, who reaches AGI first. None of that matters if the business model underneath it cannot survive being undercut. A technological advantage that cannot sustain its own economics is not an advantage. It is a head start with no finish line. America built the most advanced AI on Earth. It has not yet built an economy that survives someone selling it cheaper. And the country that figured that out is not trying to catch up. It is trying to make catching up unnecessary.