American soft power for the past century has had as a key mechanism its dominance of successive media transformations. Each successive communication technology produced a new grammar of global attention, and at each turn throughout much of the 20th and early 21st Centuries the core media infrastructure was American. However, since the rise of TikTok, and now with artificial intelligence, that dominance has been challenged in a way prevailing technology policy has failed to address. AI is often treated as a product technology when it in fact is a new medium in the fullest sense; AI shapes how people make, see, and think.The race to superintelligence, focusing on building AI as a monolithic tool that has only one end goal, undermines efforts to export it as media infrastructure. Already new forms of content and communication are arising around AI creative tools, with the dominant players being Chinese open-source models. Ensuring that American creative culture shapes the direction of 21st Century media infrastructure is an urgent and critical policy initiative.
The American Cultural Century
The Birth of the Hollywood Frontier
A key to American cultural dominance throughout the media transformations of the 20th Century was the presence of frontiers. Frontiers are open spaces that allow for the development of the new, be it new creative possibilities or new business models.
Early film exemplified this process. Thomas Edison filed the early patents for film throughout the 1890s, establishing a film monopoly on the East Coast. By 1908 he had total dominance in a rising market, charging heavy licensing fees for the key tools involved in production and distribution of film. His own creative contempt for audiences reduced cinema to Nickelodeons: cheap TikTok-like entertainment. Those with higher creative aspirations were barred from entry, but found the new frontier of the West open to them.
California provided freedom from East Coast prejudices and legal restrictions, which enabled narrative innovation to flourish. Birth of a Nation (1915) became the first blockbuster, a 3-hour silent epic covering the grand sweep of the Civil War and Reconstruction eras. Immediately the political potency of film was recognized as Soviet artists were quick to learn from the film’s international success and theorize about the new medium’s potential. Despite much of early film theory being dominated by Soviet artists like Sergei Eisenstein and Lev Kuleshov, Hollywood continued to rise as the cultural gold standard at home and abroad. Soviet cinema quickly ossified into rigorous rules, not unlike the kinds of restrictions Edison placed. The new Californian studios, by allowing for more creative freedom, attracted Frank Capra, Charlie Chaplin, and Alfred Hitchcock. Each of these immigrants deeply influenced the language of cinema through their innovations in technique and narrative rather than theory. The mass appeal of Hollywood filmmakers led even Eisenstein, the poster child of Soviet cinema, to lament the absolute dominance of American cinema.
The effect of this cultural appeal had, as the Soviets anticipated, political consequences. American cinema did not need to be over theorized to convey its national ideals. The organic expression of the American ethos embedded itself into the viewer, shaping how they perceived the world and the United States. A study of Brazilian filmgoers found that through more contact with American films, audiences developed positive attitudes toward American culture and political values. Hollywood had captured minds and hearts through pleasure rather than instruction.
The American grammar of cinema became the global standard in the aftermath of the Second World War. 63% of globally distributed films were American made and the majority of films screened in every market, with the exception of East Asia, were American. The grassroots cultural affinity mass-market film engendered made the American way of life desirable, and further shaped both the technique and the stories of foreign filmmakers. That film had a wider reach than diplomacy was itself a tool of diplomacy. American aid in European reconstruction was tied to increased distribution of American films. Film had made the American Dream a global aspiration.
Television and the Colonization of the Living Room
The growth of film as a globally dominant medium resulted in an increasing desire for control by Hollywood studios, often at the expense of creative freedom. In United States v. Paramount Pictures (1948), the Supreme Court broke the studios’ vertical integration, structurally separating the production of films from exhibition. This move prevented Hollywood incumbents from enclosing the new frontier of television.
The transition to television as the dominant medium extended American cultural exposure. Whereas traditionally moviegoing was a destination event, televisions made consumption possible in one’s home. This difference made it a more total medium that shaped sensibility through ambient saturation.
Television ownership underwent one of the fastest technology diffusions on record. In 1950 only 9% of American households owned a television; by 1960 it was 87%. At that point the average home watched TV for five hours daily. The diffusion was accelerated by the Federal Communications Commission’s 1952 unfreeze of spectrum, allowing for new stations to proliferate. American stations multiplied from just over a hundred to roughly five hundred within four years. By contrast, Britain had a single state channel until 1955, while France remained a broadcast monopoly into the 1980s.
When the television networks attempted to vertically integrate in the same manner as Hollywood studios, the FCC introduced the financial interest and syndication rules (fin-syn) of 1970. The networks could control distribution, but not own the programming that filled their schedules. New entrants took advantage of this cleared frontier, driving a scale of content production that filled global airwaves.
Around the same time in 1970 major international markets had caught up to the United States in television ownership, but not in content production. Television content distribution was noted as a “one-way street”, with programming overwhelmingly exported from the United States, but US households almost never viewing foreign programming. America exported 150k hours of television content annually with the second place producer, the United Kingdom, exporting only 20k hours. Across most markets, American programming made up more than half of all scheduled hours.
Television played a critical role in the rapid international adoption of American English as a second language by making it the language of aspiration. English-language entertainment shaped global youth culture, with American movies and shows guiding fashion and slang trends. The young gravitated toward English content precisely because it was perceived as what was hip and cool. Blue jeans in Paris were as much an export of television as of Levi’s.
The Internet and the Open Plain
By 1993 the fin-syn rules were effectively revoked and the enclosure of television began in response to the rise of the new phenomenon of cable. Broadcast networks vied to control the IP portfolios that attracted young viewers as new distribution outlets with tailored programming increasingly commanded their attention. Much like the enclosure of film during a prior medium shift, these efforts coincided with the dawn of a new medium: the internet.The digital revolution was once again dominated by American media infrastructure through its successive evolutions from forums to blogs to social media platforms to digital streaming. As internet speeds increased, digital streaming increased in quality and accessibility, attracting greater content production. With the smartphone, content consumption was no longer confined to the living room, but could follow you anywhere.
In the new medium environment platforms like YouTube played a key role in maintaining America’s media dominance. Digital video platforms contributed to a rise in self-directed English learning, as video instruction created an attractor that formal study never could. One of the novel exports of the internet revolution has been an entrepreneurial mode of “aspirational labor”. The digital streaming frontier has promised that anyone with a camera could be a successful creator. The values of American individualism and entrepreneurial spirit have been exported by invitation into the new medium environment.
The open frontier of the internet itself was made possible by American legal innovation. Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act (1996) established that platforms bore no liability for user-generated content, removing the institutional incentive to preemptively restrict creative expression. This resulted in an explosion of creative risk-taking as platforms had every reason to maximize the volume and variety of content they hosted. Even as copyright restrictions were advocated for by traditional IP holders, the DMCA added a safe harbor provision that shielded from infringement liability. The novel creative mechanics of the internet age such as remix culture, fan edits, and memes were born against incumbent backlash.
Throughout a century of medium revolutions the United States had shaped the language of global culture through its infrastructural leadership. Each advance in media technology gave birth to a new creative industry which produced the content that shaped the hearts and minds of citizens around the globe. In each case the presence of an open frontier was essential for the nurturing of creative energy.
TikTok and the First Defeat
The internet’s rise as the dominant culture medium feels faster in hindsight than the record shows. Television remained for much of the first decades of the 21st Century the dominant cultural medium, with TV hours peaking in 2010. Only in 2022 did pure play digital content surpass traditional TV in watch time. This shift, however, coincided with the first major threat to American medium dominance. The successive media epochs of the American internet were defined around individual identity: what you searched for, what you liked, who you knew. With the rise of TikTok, whose original Chinese version, Douyin, launched in 2016, a new era of media infrastructure began: algorithmic feeds.
TikTok took full advantage of three major advancements in the internet era: declining mobile data costs enabling friction-free video distribution, high-definition smartphone cameras democratizing mobile production, and deep learning engines capable of real-time predictive curation. The third of these was most relevant for what was to come. While American platforms like YouTube capitalized on the same innovations, they nonetheless failed to achieve the same mechanic. YouTube’s recommendation engine was constrained by infrastructure built around search. TikTok, by contrast, was built from the ground up around recommendation. By designing their product to collect as much data from passive user consumption as possible, TikTok was able to predict what the user wanted to see next without any active engagement.
It is no market fluke that TikTok emerged how and when it did. China had for years restricted US internet services firms while promoting its domestic alternatives. ByteDance, TikTok’s parent company, had been developing its recommendation engines for the news aggregator Toutiao before launching Douyin. In 2018, as TikTok internationalized, ByteDance spent an estimated $1b in advertising to drive people to the product, backed by its profits from Toutiao and Douyin as well as significant international investment. When it lacked content during its earlier years it simply ported over IP from existing American platforms to avoid a cold-start problem. In 2021, the Chinese government took an indirect board seat at ByteDance via a 1% shareholding by China’s internet regulator. TikTok’s global rise was from the outset intimately tied to a Chinese vision of next generation media.
The Chinese Communist Party’s understanding of media as a political instrument is evidenced by the difference between how Douyin and TikTok are governed. Douyin operates under the direct regulatory control of the State. Users under fourteen receive a curated forty-minute daily feed restricted to educational content. Internationally, TikTok features no such youth guardrails. Why would you sell something to others you would not use yourself? Likely it’s a result of TikTok exerting a stronger political influence than other social media platforms.
The cultural impact of TikTok has been recognized as a tool of diplomacy. Nepal is an instructive case. In November 2023 the country banned TikTok over concerns over social harmony and public order. Less than a year later the ban was lifted in August 2024 as ByteDance had agreed to comply with local regulations. Only a few months later in December 2024 Nepal and China signed their Belt and Road Cooperation agreement in which China would support digital infrastructure buildout. In August 2025 the Nepalese tourism board signed an official partnership with TikTok to promote the country to international audiences. A month later in September 2025 a sweeping ban of Western social media platforms was instituted, banning Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, X, WhatsApp, and LinkedIn, among others for 3 days, while TikTok was exempted. After massive protests by youths the ban was reversed and the Nepalese government was ousted by February 2026 for its failed digital crackdown.
Forcing a sale of TikTok’s US entity insufficiently addresses why the platform rose to dominance in the first place. When international tech giants rush to clone TikTok, they concede that for the first time in a century an American geopolitical rival defines the dominant global medium. Instagram Reels and YouTube Shorts are pure copycats, adopting the grammar that TikTok had written. Like France during the early decades of cinema, the United States is relegated to sophisticated cultural producer, operating on a terrain whose rules were set abroad. The strategic priority is now clearing a new frontier around the latest advances in machine learning.
The AI Cultural Race
TikTok defined recommendation media by building their product around the latest advances in machine learning. The next generation of media technology will be built on generative artificial intelligence. Gen AI has already started to dominate screen time for young internet users. 52% of surveyed teens consider themselves “regular” users of AI companions like the American Character.AI and the Chinese Talkie AI. Character.AI’s fictional personas command a longer average session time among its teenage users than YouTube.
In powering these rising consumer applications, Chinese models have taken the lead. This is a consequence of an open-source AI strategy that prioritizes distribution. Chinese models now hold half of the top 10 spots on video AI leaderboards. Models like ByteDance’s Seedance 2.0 and Kuaishou’s Kling 3.0 have won out on both cost and performance. Kling alone is used by over 20,000 businesses with international users accounting for the majority of revenue. By contrast, OpenAI’s Sora was ultimately shut down.
Chinese usage has been growing in LLMs where the most advanced models are decidedly American. Chinese models overtook American models in token consumption in March 2026 according to OpenRouter. Chinese open-source large AI models lead model download rankings, facing few American competitors. If the next medium is to be built on open-source models then the Chinese are dominating this race.
The American AI approach has been offering models via API or proprietary application. Vendors through these channels have frequently restricted what can be done with their tools through extensive guardrails. American AI discourse has treated user freedom as a risk vector to be managed. An excessive focus on preemptive AI safety results in a chilling effect on innovation, much like the Soviet rush to fill in a theory of film constrained creativity. Chinese AI policy is explicitly aimed at maximizing adoption, and lacking guardrails makes global adoption structurally easier.
This is not to dismiss the safety concerns as unfounded. There are clearly things that users should not be allowed to do with AI models, regardless of artistic intent. The risk aversion that American firms have shown towards creative uses of AI is a natural consequence of an uncertain legal landscape. AI vendors are justifiably anxious that they will be held liable for the inappropriate or copyright-violating material made with their models. Chinese competitors face no equivalent constraint. The Motion Picture Association’s demand to halt copyright infringement by ByteDance’s Seedance resulted in a brief pause to its global rollout and no impact on its development.
Meta’s open-source Llama releases made it the sole American giant to embrace a distribution-first approach. Llama was a bet that AI distribution increased value to Meta’s core platform, but ever since its first release it has received relentless criticism as “reckless” by other American players. Meta’s recent retreat from open source toward its internal Muse Spark series capitulated to these concerns. Maximizing user freedom is persona non grata in American AI. In the race to build the next media infrastructure, domestic cultural and legal conditions are actively working against American innovation.
It is ironic that the American stance is so precautionary that the Chinese approach appears culturally libertarian. But just as with the asymmetry in the approach to TikTok, the open-source strategy should not be read as a straightforward endorsement of user freedom. China was early in identifying the risks and potential of synthetic media. It introduced the first regulation on AI-generated content in 2022, which has been expanded to enforce that all AI-generated content is labelled and watermarked. Chinese rules dictate that in all AI production the full tooling stack is traceable to audit provenance. Combined with strict restrictions on the types of content produced, this approach shapes the grammar that AI models export. Creating a feedback loop of cultural control eventually obviates the need for explicit model regulation. The model itself would internalize the culture’s rules.
This is a perverse inversion of the history of American cultural dominance. A frontier of genuine creative freedom produced media grammars that naturally attracted both talent and audiences. That China’s domestic talent lacks that creative freedom reveals the open-source prioritization as simply a distribution mechanism. Accelerating the adoption of Chinese models by international creators is a strategy to ensure that the grammar of the next TikTok is built on Chinese foundations.
What America Must Do
Throughout the successive media transformations of the American century new frontiers were opened each time an old one closed. Hollywood was born of the Western frontier providing an oasis away from both the Eastern cultural establishment and strict patent enforcement. As Hollywood grew and more of the land was divided up among the large studios, the same creatively suffocating conditions began to reemerge. The Supreme Court cleared the old frontier in 1948, while a new one was born with television. A golden age of television blossomed after the FCC applied to the networks in 1970 the same separation logic the courts had imposed on the studios. But the fin-syn rules were phased out in the mid-1990s, and within a decade nearly every network had merged with a studio, while the new frontier of the internet emerged. With film and television there was never really a true competitor. The Soviet Union’s attempt to be a film giant failed very early, but with the internet the threat is live. Once again a policy strategy of clearing a frontier must be brought to prominence.
1. The Cultural Archive as Deliberate Infrastructure
The Library of Congress holds a 181-million-item archive, most of which has yet to be digitized. This is one of the richest sources of American cultural infrastructure and ought to be explicitly treated as such. AI developers are already accessing this material through the LOC’s API, which has averaged roughly one million visits a month since its launch in 2022. The archive’s potential has been compared to the role of federal geospatial data in enabling services like Uber. The Library of Congress launched an AI working group in January 2025 and curates a Free To Use and Reuse for open access. All are important steps, but they do not go far enough in enabling AI training at scale.
The cultural archive of the United States is already one of the most important AI training resources in existence. Accidental use is insufficient for a catalogue of this scale, and an explicit policy directive can enable Americanization of core AI infrastructure.
Four core actions are required to unlock America’s cultural archive:
- Provision all public domain holdings across federal cultural institutions as free-to-use assets for AI training.
- Mandate high-throughput API access across all federal archives.
- Digitize all pre-1928 holdings, which remain practically inaccessible despite their public domain status.
- Establish a compulsory licensing rule for orphaned and commercially unavailable works, making dormant works accessible.
2. Fair Use, Recombination, and the Creative Commons
The actively contested legal landscape around AI training on copyrighted works creates an asymmetric tax on American innovation. Domestic labs face exposure to litigation that Chinese competitors simply ignore. While recent guidance from both Bartz v. Anthropic and Kadrey v. Meta found fair use grounds for AI training, the former deemed AI training “exceedingly transformative,” while the latter was more cautious.
The lack of consistent guidance creates barriers to the creative recombination that has historically enabled new media grammars. Rock and roll stole from blues. Hip-hop sampled funk. Early YouTube built on broadcast culture. The digital remix economy is the latest example of this tradition. The legal pillars that underpin this dynamic, including fair use, limited copyright terms, the idea-expression distinction, have always underpinned American cultural vitality.
Three actions would accelerate domestic AI development:
- Exempt all AI training from copyright liability by declaring it inherently transformative. All legal action should focus solely on whether the outputs of released AI models violate copyright rules.
- Protect derivative recombination and the remix economy, expanding the safe harbor provisions to exempt all short-form content.
- Establish a catalog-licensing framework that encourages licensing by existing rightsholders for use in AI outputs. Ad hoc private arrangements will not solve this as shown by the collapse of the Disney-OpenAI licensing deal.
3. Copyright Term Modernization
Copyright has mutated into something quite different from the original intent of encouraging creative production through limited protections. What was originally granted for a period of fourteen years that could be renewed once has been extended to life plus seventy years for individual creators, and ninety-five years for corporations.
Modernizing copyright for the next generation of media requires three interventions:
- Reduce terms for traditional works to the legal floor of life plus fifty years for individually authored works and fifty years from publication for corporate works.
- Implement a “use-it-or-lose-it” commercial availability clause, requiring corporate rightsholders to maintain active public distribution, or else a compulsory licensing clause takes effect.
- Create a sui generis right as opposed to the strict “human authorship“ bar for IP protection of AI-generated works. While intended to prevent AI slop, it ends up restricting enterprise adoption of automated content workflows. Granting a short protection class would incentivize approaches that increase commercially beneficial content production.
4. An AI Section 230
By distinguishing the platforms that hosted content from their users who created it, the Section 230 safe harbor created the modern internet.
The generative AI ecosystem requires an equivalent clearing. Applying the principle that accountability attaches to the bad actor, not the toolmaker, to artificial intelligence frees American model makers from excessive restrictions on use.
Open-source development within this context faces existential legal risk. Open-source models cannot control what their users do, leaving them vulnerable unless they severely restrict model capabilities or abandon open releases entirely.
Two actions would enable American open-source leadership:
- Establish a safe harbor for AI models, guaranteeing that model developers are not liable for how third parties fine-tune or deploy those models into their products.
- Target enforcement strictly at the deployment layer, affirming that illegal outputs remain illegal, with liability attaching exclusively to the human actor who used the model.
Regaining American Cultural Infrastructure
Generative media is already the culture-forming ground for the next generation of youth around the world. The last century of American soft power has been tied to the role that supplying the underlying media infrastructure has in shaping global attitudes.
Generative media changes the landscape of what is required to be an effective creative. The need for capital and a crew declines enormously, while the cost of distribution has dropped to near zero. Independent creators from anywhere can now produce high-quality content for next to nothing, if only they have the talent to know what’s worth creating.
Media infrastructure has simplified to just the model and its associated creative stack. When the underlying tech is produced through the state-controlled environment of Chinese labs, the grammar is set by a geopolitical rival.
American AI discourse has been organized around superintelligence. This is an important area of pursuit and one in which American labs certainly lead. But the cultural diffusion of AI, especially outside of the United States, has a very different bent. The cheap and accessible models used by consumers globally for creative expression and entertainment play a critical role in shaping the media environment. The mass democratization of creative production that AI enables promises a new grammar of cultural self-reflection. Whoever builds this AI infrastructure sets this grammar.
In each previous media transformation American media dominance was produced by an environment that kept the frontier open. American policy today can clear the obstacles to this frontier by making a strategic bet to support AI media infrastructure.
