I once saw an episode of America’s Dumbest Criminals where a man called the cops to report his car stolen, only for it to turn out he’d stolen it from someone else in the first place. I couldn’t help thinking of him this week while watching OpenAI’s Sam Altman wet his pants about the fact that a Chinese hedge fund might have made unauthorised use of his own chatbot models, including ChatGPT, to train its new little side project. This is the cheaper, more open, extremely share-price-slashing DeepSeek.

As news of DeepSeek played havoc with the tech stock market, OpenAI pressed its hanky to its nose and released a statement: “We are aware of and reviewing indications that DeepSeek may have inappropriately distilled our models, and will share information as we know more,” this ran. “We take aggressive, proactive countermeasures to protect our technology.” Oooooooooh! I want to say “welcome to America’s Dumbest Tech Barons”, except I can’t, because I think we all know that no law enforcement is coming to get Sam for the stuff he’s alleged to have made unauthorised use of first. That was the good type of alleged theft, whatever the claims of all the lawsuits belatedly trying to claw something back for the alleged copyright victims of his firm’s own inappropriate methods.

So, to put it another way … wait, Sam – you’re not telling us that the Chinese hedge fund crawled all over your IP without asking and took it for themselves? Oh my God, IMAGINE?! You must feel used and abused. Financially violated. Like all your years of creativity were just grist to some other bastard’s mill. Like a host organism. Like a schmuck. Like Earth’s most screamingly preposterous hypocrite.

Anyway, are you particularly familiar with Sam Altman? I think he’s becoming almost my worst one. Elon Musk remains the edgelord overlord to beat, of course, but honestly, it’s getting extremely difficult to avoid appreciating just how much of a super-irritant the OpenAI boss has become. Physically, he resembles the kind of actor who shows up to an audition thinking he’s a perfect leading man, but who gets cast as the puppy-eyed loner who just happens to take a trophy from each one of his victims. Which, in a funny kind of way, I guess he is. Sam’s got every living creative down there in his basement well. “It feeds my machine its script, or it gets the hose … ” I think I have to say here that he and OpenAI deny all this. The unauthorised scraping of human creativity, I mean – I’m not sure if anyone’s asked him about the basement well, so do consider that one unsolved.

But where were we? Ah yes: the Altman journey. “To anyone familiar with the history of Germany in the 1930s,” declared Sam back in 2016, “it’s chilling to watch Trump in action.” Well, now. Purely going on Sam’s own rather crass analogy, he now seems to have turned into one of those German industrialists who gladly popped into the chancellery for a slice of cake. And, indeed, for a slice of the cake.

But as I say, that’s Sam’s analogy – anyone who’s ever skimmed over his recommended books list knows he’s very much rooted in the business history section of the airport bookshop, and consequently shouldn’t be relied upon to produce a single comparison that isn’t with either the Third Reich or ancient Rome. If you want to feature on his recommended books list next year, just get the freebie version of ChatGPT to fart you out something called Rome: the First Reich. He will find it “fascinating”, “unexpected”, and “really thought-provoking”.

Needless to say, Sam was there at the inauguration of the current American caesar. As far as I could see, he didn’t make the cut of those tech titans placed in front of Trump’s supposed actual cabinet. I did, however, note that he was filmed having some bulging-eyed chat with Jake and Logan Paul – YouTubers, podcasters, energy drink dealers, and “boxers”. I suppose one of the comic pleasures of these times is watching the nerds making common cause with the guys who would 100% have given them a wedgie in school, purely because they are now all rich. Money’s one weird side-effect is to unite some of the worst wedgers and wedgees.

Alas, like the rest of the Silicon Valley horror-moguls, Sam is now a fact of all our lives, and – along with the Trump administration he is thoroughly cosied up to – is telling everyone how to think about DeepSeek. This is really a key dynamic of the next few years: being told we should be very worried about what the authoritarian Chinese are doing by Silicon Valley authoritarians we should also be extremely worried about. For us little people, the choice seems to be between being data-jacked and screwed over by the undemocratic Chinese, or being data-jacked and screwed over by the post-democratic tech bros. Once again, it’s the old syphilis or Ebola menu choice.

The only thing worse than being this impotent and option-free is having to listen to the Silicon Valley gazillionaires whining about it all, and demanding more public money to defend themselves. But why wouldn’t they? Their whining always works. Every time they say we should get rid of all government subsidies while keeping their own, or threaten to abandon building projects if required to pay normal taxes like everyone else, they get what they want. Already Trump’s AI tsar is gibbering obligingly that it’s “possible” that theft of OpenAI’s IP has occurred.

As the entrepreneur and investor Scott Galloway has pointed out on numerous occasions, big tech are the biggest welfare queens that ever stalked the Earth. They’ve all drawn vast benefits from public money, chased countless tax breaks and demanded even more. Far from being some heroic form of risk-taking done without a single handout, theirs is the capitalism of the school bake sale – someone else buys all the ingredients and does most of the cooking, and the kids then claim they have turned a profit for the good of humanity.

Meanwhile, it’s left to sidelined Cassandras to flash the warning lights. This week, Yoshua Bengio, the Canadian computer scientist and a so-called godfather of AI, warned of the shock arrival of DeepSeek that: “It’s going to mean a closer race, which usually is not a good thing from the point of view of AI safety.” You’ll note that barely a day goes by without someone described as a “godfather of AI” coming out to caution against its increasingly malign potential and capabilities. AI seems to have more godparents than even Sleeping Beauty. And, regrettably, more than one significant prick.

• Marina Hyde is a Guardian columnist