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. 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.
“Global pacing will require cooperation with China, the autocratic country with by far the most advanced AI capabilities,” Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei wrote in a blog post published Saturday titled “We Must Pace the Frontier.”
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. Meanwhile, China would only talk if it’s being treated from a position of equals.”
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, “which makes the proposal feel inauthentic to Chinese readers.”
Amodei went on to make what might seem like a heroic leap in logic: He argued that weakening China’s AI industry would somehow give the US more leverage and make “an agreement more likely in the future.” How, exactly, that is supposed to entice Beijing to come to the negotiating table is left unexplained. (To Amodei’s credit, he later admitted in a television interview that he has “no idea how to negotiate with China.”)
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 next day, the ministry also stressed that “China puts equal emphasis on development and security in terms of AI.”
The mixed comments are reflective of another reason that Beijing may be less receptive to the Anthropic CEO’s warnings than other audiences. 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.