Why China Isn’t Panicking About AI Armageddon

The Journal.

This episode explores why China isn't alarmed by AI existential risks despite global fears, highlighting how geopolitical competition, histo

Key takeaways

• China views AI advancement as essential for national competitiveness, not an existential threat.
• Chinese AI policy prioritizes state control, social stability, and technological parity over existential risk mitigation.

Main topics

• AI arms race between U.S. and China
• Divergent approaches to AI safety and regulation

Notable quotes

"Worrying about the AI apocalypse is sort of like a problem of privilege."

Conclusion

China's focus remains on catching up technologically and maintaining s

Transcript preview

Speaker 4 (0:05) Here in the United States, over the past week, there's been a lot of panic about how quickly AI is advancing and whether it could bring about the end of humanity. But in China, there doesn't seem to be the same level of concern. Speaker 4 (0:20) They've actually responded with umbrage, but not for the reason you would think. Our colleague Stu Wu covers business and tech in Asia. And he says that in China, worrying about the AI apocalypse is sort of like a problem of privilege. The way China sees it, this is a problem for tomorrow Speaker 3 (0:37) or years away. When you talk to researchers inside the labs, they think they're behind the great American models like Ad Anthropic and OpenAI. And they're thinking, well, this is not a big deal for us yet. We don't think our models are going to end the world anytime soon. What we got to do right now is make sure that our products are competitive with Speaker 4 (0:55) the American products because we're not there yet. And if Beijing isn't willing to get on board with an AI slowdown, it's unlikely Washington, D.C. will either. Speaker 4 (1:06) Stu says this standoff reminds a lot of people of one of the defining moments of the last century. Think about the original nuclear arms race. They think Speaker 3 (1:15) the U.S. has invented the first atomic weapon. And then the U.S. said, whoa, whoa, whoa, this thing we invented is actually super dangerous and everybody should slow down research on their own nukes. And China's thinking, wait a minute, that's not fair. We definitely don't feel safer if America is the only one that has the nukes. So they're saying, we're going to keep on working on our stuff. Full steam ahead. Speaker 4 (1:39) Welcome to The Journal, our show about money, business, and power. I'm Ryan Knudson. It's Wednesday, September 16th. Coming up on the show, why is it so hard to de-escalate the AI arms race? Chinese President Xi Jinping has made AI development one of the country's top priorities, urging vast investment in the new technology and dedicating a huge amount of China's resources to building it. And China is concerned about the risks of AI. But their approach so far has been very different from the U.S. In general, Speaker 3 (2:35) and I think a lot of people would be surprised by this, China takes AI safety really seriously. They've been thinking about this for 10 years. But what they consider AI safety is a lot different than what the American labs talk about. So let's rewind. Speaker 3 (2:50) So 10 years ago, it started with the company that would go on to invent TikTok. That's ByteDance. Their first big product was this news app. And the special thing about it was that human editors didn't decide what its users read. They used an algorithm. Basically, a machine decided based on what you previously read, what article you would see next. And the founder would brag about this in Chinese media. And that caught the attention of the leaders of the Chinese government. They're thinking, no, no, no, no. You know, for 80 years or so, the Chinese government has had all control over media, over bookstores, newspapers, and the internet in Speaker 4 (3:27) China. So the Chinese government got very involved in regulating algorithms and AI. Now, for example, if you search in China for Tiananmen Square on social media or ask an AI chatbot about it, you'll find almost nothing about that 1989 massacre when the government killed hundreds of people. So how does China regulate AI to be pro-government? Speaker 3 (3:50) The government makes sure that they know what the training data is that the Chinese cap-outs are being used to train. And then they make both the companies and local government agencies test the answers to make sure that it doesn't say anything that will incite people to rebel against the government, right? So that's really serious. That's number one. AI companies must protect the rule of the Communist Party. Along the way, they decided, OK, there's other things that we should worry about. We don't want anything destabilizing society in general. We don't want kids getting addicted to AI. We don't want people dating AI chatbots and not having kids and marrying and all that. They're worried about cell phone, all the stuff that the American companies are worried about, too. Speaker 4 (4:31) You mean like they don't want people to use it so much that they like lose track of reality. So put limits on it in that sense. Yeah, exactly. So I Speaker 3 (4:37) think that's something they share