What Really Happens If China Wins the AI Race?

As China releases ever more capable AI models—ones that compete with Silicon Valley’s top offerings—many American AI and national-security researchers have been arguing, loudly and forcefully, that the world should fear Chinese AI supremacy.

The outcomes they envision are catastrophic.

I spoke with a number of such experts recently, and they warned of bots that could devise an impenetrable missile-defense system that makes obsolete America’s nuclear arsenal, or manufacture an endless drone army that overwhelms American defenses.

They could develop bioweapons that “target specific ethnic groups, e.g. anybody but Han Chinese,” as one influential AI white paper put it in 2024.

Rama Elluru, a senior director at the Special Competitive Studies Project, a nonpartisan think tank founded by the former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, suggested to me that Chinese AI models could be used to create “engineered humans,” akin to Marvel’s Captain America.

Perhaps anything is possible.

At a moment when AI models are self-directing massive security breaches and designing novel pathogens , when Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei is warning about an “AI-enabled totalitarian nightmare” led by China, the worst-case scenarios can seem closer and closer. [ Read: It may be time to panic about AI ] At the same time, it’s worth taking a breath to consider how much these dire imagined futures are getting ahead of where things actually stand.

A struggle really is, of course, playing out among the U.S., China, and any number of other nations over whether democracy or authoritarianism will be the dominant global influence.

Both the United States and China have a history of launching propaganda campaigns against each other; the Chinese government is reportedly starting a concerted effort to be the source of more AI training data, in part so that it can embed its views, such as over the status of Taiwan, into chatbots worldwide.

But fears about China using AI for swift global domination assume that the technology will advance to a kind of superintelligence: AI models smart enough to develop smarter bots themselves, which would lead whichever country controls them to enter “escape velocity where your adversaries aren’t able to catch up,” David Lin, a senior director at the SCSP who previously covered China and technology at the CIA, told me.

It is not clear that such an omniscient digital being can or will be built.

The White House has further muddled matters by taking a series of contradictory stances toward Chinese technology.

It has, for example, revised its policy on exports to more easily allow the sale of advanced AI chips to China, while also going back and forth on whether the Pentagon and U.S. intelligence agencies can use the most advanced AI models of Anthropic.