Aidan Gomez doesn’t need an introduction in AI circles — he co-authored “Attention Is All You Need,” the 2017 paper that gave the world the transformer architecture powering everything from ChatGPT to Claude. So when the Cohere CEO tells CNBC that America’s AI lead is “evaporating very quickly,” the room listens differently than if it came from a random pundit.
Gomez made the comments on CNBC’s “The Tech Download” on September 10, sitting down with Arjun Kharpal to talk through who actually controls AI, what’s driving cyber risk higher, and why the China narrative Washington has been pushing doesn’t hold up under scrutiny.
The Distillation Defense Nobody Asked For
The timing wasn’t subtle. Gomez’s remarks landed two days after the NSA, CISA, and the FBI fired off a joint advisory naming six Chinese firms accused of running industrial-scale distillation operations — the practice of siphoning outputs from bigger models to cheaply train smaller ones. The official line: China’s progress is mostly theft dressed up as innovation.
Gomez didn’t deny distillation happens. He just refused to let it explain everything. “They have developed an exceptional capability independent of distillation,” he said, pointing out that the newest Chinese models are already beating top American systems on select benchmarks. His verdict on the “just copying” narrative: real at the margins, but increasingly a comfortable lie the industry tells itself.
Why Cohere’s CEO Has Skin in This Game
This isn’t a neutral take. Cohere has built its entire pitch around enterprise and “sovereign AI” — the idea that governments and companies shouldn’t have to bet everything on one country’s tech stack. A world where the US-China gap is closing fast is a world where sovereign AI sells itself. Compare that to Nvidia’s Jensen Huang, who has stayed closer to the “American tech is still essential” script — and whose revenue depends on that gap staying wide.
Gomez also used the sit-down to flag a separate danger: AI models are becoming, in his words, one of the most potent cyber weapons ever built, capable of finding and exploiting vulnerabilities at machine speed. Combine that with soaring frontier-model costs and murky questions over who controls the infrastructure underneath it all, and the picture Gomez painted wasn’t optimism — it was urgency.
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The subtext for markets: the AI leadership story isn’t a settled US victory lap. It’s an open contest, and one of the people who helped build the technology just said so on camera.
Disclaimer: The information in this article is for general purposes only and does not constitute financial advice. The author’s views are personal and may not reflect the views of chainrant.com. Before making any investment decisions, you should always conduct your own research. chainrant.com is not responsible for any financial losses.
