Op-Ed: China’s AI breakthrough should be a wake-up call: The next supply chain is made of code

Recently, a Chinese artificial intelligence model called Kimi K3 sent shockwaves through global markets. Nvidia’s stock fell. Taiwan’s markets dropped more than 6% in a single day.

What rattled investors wasn’t simply that China released another AI model. It was growing evidence that Chinese companies may be narrowing the capability gap while dramatically lowering the cost of building and running frontier AI. That shift could reshape markets and potentially geopolitics.

I spent 25 years building software before serving as Indiana’s State Treasurer, and currently lead the State Financial Officers Foundation’s Digital Assets Task Force. So I usually can’t help reading the news like an engineer who codes.

A few years ago, Indiana became the first state in the nation to require our public pension system to divest from companies based in or controlled by Communist China. We completed that divestment four years ahead of schedule. We did not wait for Washington. We looked at the risk and acted.

Selling a Chinese stock out of a pension...