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

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.