Does China Want an AI Slowdown? How China Sees AI Risks and How They're Trying to Regulate AI

So in the US, there's been this huge wake-up call moment where suddenly everyone's talking about whether AI might, quote-unquote, "kill us all." Uh, industry leaders like Dario Amodei of Anthropic have issued calls to, quote-unquote, "pace the frontier" or slow down the speed of AI development so we can get a better handle on some of these risks.

But then there's China.

Many worry that unless we get China on board, um, a slowdown from just the US AI labs alone won't be enough and will actually just give China a chance to forge ahead.

So what do you make about all this, and how has China been reacting to these calls for an AI slowdown?

Yeah, I mean, that's a really good point to bring up.

Um, I think the most critical point I wanna make is that the argument that we cannot slow down AI development because China isn't slowing down is a bit of a logical fallacy.

I think when, when we say, or at least when the Trump administration says that we can't slow down because China's not slowing down, what that often means is we can't place any regulations on our AI companies because China also won't regulate AI, and that is just not true, right? China has every intention of regulating AI companies.

In fact, as you know very well, I think, you know, it's already regulating domestic AI, right? I think we could probably maybe get a little bit more into that later.

Um, and, and Xi Jinping said this year, uh, uh, at the World Artificial Intelligence Conference in his keynote address that while China supports AI, they also fully intend to regulate it.

So it's a little bit of a false equivalence there, right? And I think the reason that's true is because, you know, China doesn't really consider regulation a slowdown.

Regulation in China goes hand in hand with tech development, and of course, China's one of the most heavily regulated network environments on Earth.

Um, you know, Chinese regulators often talk about regulation as a net positive, um, you know, with the idea that once they put guardrails around the industry and sort of define what the industry is allowed to do and isn't allowed to do, that removes uncertainty for companies.

It prevents industry from sort of running off down unsafe pathways or pathways that are unhealthy for the market and just wasting a bunch of time, you know, doing something that the state is gonna ban anyway, something like that, right? Um, uh, uh, of course, none of that is to say that China doesn't, like, recognize the difference between poorly executed regulation that does hamper the market and well-executed regulation, uh, but obviously they know the difference between those two things.

But generally speaking, well-executed regulation is kind of seen as something worth pursuing, and that's obviously not how the US tends to view regulation, particularly under the current administration.

Um, so uh, uh, I think this view that-- China's view that regulation and innovation can sort of exist in reasonably healthy tension has been borne out by the country's sort of experience in the platform economy, right? I mean, we've kind of said for years that, I don't know, heavy censorship regulations placed on Chinese technology companies would prevent China from being competitive in digital technologies, and that didn't really prove to be the case.

Um, obviously China has a very strong internet sector.

So the f- yeah, the first point I wanted to make was just that, that, uh, uh, the way that we are talking about a slowdown and the way that China is talking about a slowdown, uh, I think those mean two very different things, and they often get sort of mixed up and conflated.