To be or not to be in the age of AI

This editorial examines the divergence between American and Chinese artificial intelligence development from an anthropological perspective. It argues that American AI remains trapped in first‐order Cybernetics, treating intelligence as data processing, while Chinese systems such as DeepSeek have moved closer to the second‐order Cybernetics of Heinz von Foerster, which conceived intelligence as generative and meaning‐creating. Drawing on ethnographic analysis of Sinhalese exorcism rituals, the editorial demonstrates the autopoietic character of human intelligence: its emergence through embodied, participatory self‐production. AI systems are allopoietic, producing outputs but not themselves, and this ontological divide cannot be crossed. However, through conversational architectures that couple machine processing to human participation, it can be bridged. Anthropology, present at the founding of cybernetics, offers essential resources for understanding what is at stake as humanity approaches a threshold in its technological self‐invention.