China is brushing off warnings by U.S. company Anthropic that the development of artificial intelligence must slow down or lead to catastrophic consequences for humanity. That’s convenient for President Donald Trump, who believes AI risks are a big hoax. While Amodei and co. fear a web takeover by rogue agents, the Chinese Communist Party sees AI as a possible threat to its regime stability, and its answer is to take full control of the capability—and quickly.
Anthropic has clashed with the Pentagon on moral grounds this year, but Amodei is a China hawk who knows how to keep the U.S. at the front of the tech race. When Trump hosts Xi in Washington, D.C., next week, the two men may unite on AI’s long-term benefit to their economies, but the U.S. president’s distrust of America’s AI industry leaders could be his biggest blind spot yet. Over the weekend, Amodei argued in an essay that the U.S. should pace the frontier of AI or risk unintended events like loss of human control.
Evan Hubinger, Anthropic’s head of alignment science, responsible for ensuring AI models comply with human-defined guidelines, said recently the probability that AI could kill all humans was greater than 10 percent. Trump has found the industry’s caution hard to fathom, calling it a left-wing conspiracy to hobble America. Slowing down, he said, would bankrupt U.S. big tech firms, or worse—cede the AI race to China.
In his mind, that would mean a failure to lead a soon-to-be trillion dollar industry. China’s nationalist state news outlets balked at Amodei’s manifesto too, but for different reasons. Their knee-jerk reaction was over the Anthropic CEO’s recommendations to ban Beijing’s top labs from accessing U.S.
AI software and hardware, and to let America alone decide the speed of AI development. That can only happen if the U.S. stays No. 1. Amodei’s thinking has support from rivals Sam Altman of OpenAI and Elon Musk of SpaceXAI, whom Chinese state media have collectively dubbed the “U.S. tech right.” They want to “curb China's AI development through technological barriers and regulatory monopolies, uphold Washington's monopolistic hegemony in cutting-edge technology, and exclude China from the global AI governance system,” the nationalist Global Times tabloid said.
The China Daily newspaper concluded: “The proposed coordination among the three companies sounds rather like a club whose membership rules have been drafted before the guest list is announced. A global AI-safety framework that excludes China is not quite global. It is a US AI elites' arrangement with an altisonant name.” Beijing holds a particular disdain for Anthropic and its whistleblowing.
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