China Isn’t Buying Silicon Valley’s Call for an AI

What happened

For years, many of the most powerful people in Silicon Valley have argued that the US is locked in an AI arms race with China, and that the consequences of losing would be disastrous. But over the past week, those same executives have started emphasizing a different message.

Unlike many of the loudest voices in Silicon Valley, China’s leaders are not primarily concerned about so-called existential risks from AI, such as the possibility that a rogue agent could kill everyone on Earth. Like in many other policy areas, Beijing’s prevailing anxiety is that AI could disrupt domestic social stability or threaten the Chinese Communist Party’s grip on power.

“Beijing finds it difficult to take these calls at face value partly because it’s skeptical of the possibility of achieving AGI and doubtful of the narrative that AI poses extreme risks to humanity,” says Michelle Nie, a visiting fellow at the Center for a New American Security focused on national security and artificial intelligence.

” In a recent essay, China’s minister of state security Chen Yixin warned that AI could fuel political disinformation, cyberattacks, espionage, social unrest, and new military threats. He spent far less time on the kinds of doomsday scenarios that frequently preoccupy people at US frontier AI labs. “Chinese policymakers tend to read US companies’ calls for AI safety as instrumental,” says Nie.

Why it matters

AI has the potential to become so dangerous, tech leaders say, that the two countries urgently need to work together to slow the race down. ” China’s government and AI companies have made it clear that they’re deeply skeptical of Amodei’s proposal, but not because they want to keep blindly racing ahead or don't believe the technology poses serious risks.

The problem the Chinese government and Chinese AI companies see is far simpler. They think they’re being offered a bad deal. “The AI safety community in China is growing and shares many of the same concerns that American labs do,” says Kevin Xu, founder of the technology hedge fund Interconnected Capital and a former White House staffer under President Barack Obama.

“The gulf lies between an Anthropic-led vision that would only subjugate and restrict China first to maximize leverage before talking. " Amodei wrote that a “key part” of the slowdown strategy should be ensuring that the US and other democracies maintain “as large as possible” a lead in AI development over autocracies like China.

To do that, he urged the US to take steps including cracking down on chip smuggling and preventing unauthorized model distillation by Chinese companies. “His essay specifically says the pacing of AI is conditional to increasing the lead over China," says Alvin Wang Graylin, a senior fellow Asia Society Policy Institute's Center for China Analysis and a digital fellow at the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered AI.

” How, exactly, that is supposed to entice Beijing to come to the negotiating table is left unexplained. ”) The government officials, AI researchers, and other prominent commentators in China who responded to Amodei haven’t argued that AI poses no risks. But many of them clearly resent the idea that their country should simultaneously be treated as an essential governance partner and a competitor that needs to be constrained.

When asked about Amodei’s blog post on Monday at a press conference, Guo Jiakun, a spokesperson for China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, didn’t mince words: He described the proposal as “fear-mongering, confrontation, and vicious competition” that would only hamper global AI cooperation efforts. ” The mixed comments are reflective of another reason that Beijing may be less receptive to the Anthropic CEO’s warnings than other audiences.

What to watch

” That skepticism is also shared by many people who work in China’s AI industry, which has broadly focused on releasing lower-cost, open-weight models. In a widely shared essay published on Sunday, a researcher at DeepSeek said he believes AI could move human society to one of two extremes. In the first, powerful AI is broadly available and raises living standards.

In the second, a handful of tech companies control the most advanced systems and the resources that come with them, making it even harder for everyone else to catch up.