China bogeyman looms large over American firms’ AI doomsday scenario

China bogeyman looms large over American firms’ AI doomsday scenario. Skip to main contentSkip to navigationAlvaro Dominguez / Guardian Design / Getty ImagesChina bogeyman looms large over American firms’ AI doomsday scenarioSilicon Valley China hawks, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei among them, fear the country surpassing US’s AI lead as much as superintelligence destroying humanity When reporters asked Donald Trump this week if he supported calls to slow down the development of artificial intelligence out of growing fears for cybersecurity, public safety and the fate of humanity, he said no.

What happened

But the specter across the Pacific looms so large in the Anthropic CEO’s mind that, when outlining how to prevent human extinction, beating Beijing was paramount. “Make it explicit in international diplomacy that preventing AI extinction scenarios is considered a priority above preventing a full nuclear exchange, and that allied nuclear countries are willing to run some risk of nuclear exchange if that’s what it takes to reduce the risk of large AI training runs,” Yudkowsky wrote in a 2023 Time Magazine essay.

Karp has meanwhile framed the AI competition with China as a fight for geopolitical supremacy and suggested Americans should accept tradeoffs to their civil liberties to win. “When people are worried about surveillance, of course there are huge dangers there, but it’s like, you will have far fewer rights if America is not in the lead. ”The view from ChinaWhile Amodei and other US AI leaders frame competition with China as a race to reach a super-powerful artificial intelligence first and worry about AI breaking free of human control, experts say that most Chinese firms and their government don’t view the technology the same way.

Silicon Valley China hawks, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei among them, fear the country surpassing US’s AI lead as much as superintelligence destroying humanityWhen reporters asked Donald Trump this week if he supported calls to slow down the development of artificial intelligence out of growing fears for cybersecurity, public safety and the fate of humanity, he said no. His argument: China. “We’re leading China in AI,” Trump said. “We’re the most sophisticated country in the world, and frankly, I want to ⁠keep it that way, because whoever wins AI, wins. ” Continue reading. . .

The US is in a heated technological race with China, companies including Anthropic and OpenAI have argued, and any regulation that would cede the contest risks incalculable economic and political harm. Even as Dario Amodei, Anthropic’s CEO, led an industry-wide call this week to “pace the frontier”, he declared that the US could only slow down to the point where China could not catch up.

The wider picture

“If we greatly restrain our AI capabilities in the belief that China will do the same, and then China defects, AI could be so powerful that such a defection could lead to their geopolitical dominance,” Amodei warned. In recent years, parts of Silicon Valley have positioned themselves as the vanguard in a new cold war with China, arguing fiercely that the industry’s technological advancements are essential to both US hegemony and the liberal world order.

Influential tech leaders have meanwhile written essays and policy documents calling for efforts to deter and degrade China’s AI capabilities, sometimes advocating for threatening armed conflict if necessary, in an attempt to influence foreign policy. As public calls for reining in the AI industry intensify and the risks associated with the technology increase, various industry forces are trying to ensure they are the ones with the answer to the question “what about China? ”. Amodei’s worst China fearsFew have been more vocal about the threat of Chinese state-controlled artificial intelligence than Amodei.

The Anthropic CEO has argued for years that one of the reasons he’s so animated to advance AI is to ensure that the technology falls into the hands of Democratic governments and not oppressive regimes such as China. Amodei’s position has made him one of Silicon Valley’s most vocal critics of China’s tech industry, separating him from fellow AI leaders such as OpenAI CEO Sam Altman or Meta founder Mark Zuckerberg, who frame the competition more in corporate or economic terms; and people such as Jensen Huang, Nvidia’s CEO, who have encouraged the use of Chinese AI models.

Demis Hassabis, the leader of Google Deepmind, has made few public remarks on China in comparison with his peers.

What has been reported

“Sam Altman doesn’t have especially strong views when it comes to China. Amodei has long asserted that in order to stop China’s advancement, the US and its allies should take aggressive action to limit Chinese AI companies’ growth – most notably blocking the sale of advanced semiconductor chips and manufacturing equipment necessary for improving AI. (Huang of Nvidia has bristled at this position, calling export controls a failure and urging Trump to ease restrictions. )But Amodei’s position was perhaps most on display last weekend, in his response to warnings from a young Anthropic researcher who resigned, predicting human extinction by the end of the decade at the digital hands of AI.

The apocalyptic string of tweets by Jacob Coxon did not mention China. Chhabra has campaigned against the sale of chips to China and has called for a full-scale government effort to curb the Chinese Communist party’s AI advancements. Instead, the CCP seeks run-the-table dominance and control of the most critical technologies and supply chains,” Chhabra told a Senate hearing last year, adding that he believed the Biden administration did not take decisive or rapid enough action to maintain the US lead against China.

Photograph: Carlos Barría/ReutersAmodei’s concern over export controls has also placed him in the company of other influential China hawks. He wrote an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal last year with Matt Pottinger, the architect of Trump’s first-term China policy, urging the administration to clamp down on chip exports. Pottinger, a visiting fellow at the conservative Hoover Institution and author of a book on how to defend Taiwan against a Chinese attack, argued in 2024 that the US and China were in the “foothills of a great-power hot war”.

What happens next

Anthropic and Amodei’s stance on China puts the company in strange tension with its own domestic policy. At the same time as Anthropic advocates for more safeguards, it has made clear that it will aggressively oppose any policy it perceives as giving China the chance to overtake the US. While Ball has criticized Amodei’s framing of the competition with China,, he has expressed a similar pessimism on US-China cooperation. Alas, such harmony now appears impossible,” Ball wrote of China last year.

“We are locked into a structural conflict. ”Silicon Valley’s China hawksAlthough Amodei is the AI industry’s most prominent voice on China, fears of Beijing gaining advanced AI capabilities and using them for global domination run through Silicon Valley. Several of the tech figures focused on China have connections, like Amodei himself, to the effective altruism movement – a quasi-utilitarian idea that society should focus on projects that maximize the good and reduce the most harm for humanity.

Leopold Aschenbrenner, a 25-year-old former OpenAI researcher, founder of an influential AI hedge fund, and husband to Amodei’s chief of staff, called for a government-led effort to reach super-intelligent AI before China in a 165-page paper.