China’s AI Rollout Is Messier Than It Looks

Anxiety about AI in the United States appears to be getting worse.

Prosaic concerns about machines disrupting industries, stealing jobs, and compromising schoolwork are giving way to more harrowing fears about the end of humanity.

Even after top AI executives in the U.S. called for slowing down the breakneck pace of development, President Trump dismissed these safety concerns as a “hoax” that would hand China an advantage in the race for AI supremacy.

Outside of China, Trump’s assertion may appear well founded.

While the U.S. roils over the prospects of AI, China’s leadership looks to be charging ahead.

In surveys, Chinese people appear more enthusiastic about AI and its potential benefits than respondents in the U.S., and they are adopting it more quickly.

Although Chinese President Xi Jinping has expressed more alarm than Trump about the threats of AI—and has even called for regulation to “ensure that AI is always under human control”—his government has made adopting the technology a national priority.

The plan is to have AI in every aspect of China’s economy and society by 2035.

The country’s steady release of AI models that are open-source, high-performing, and relatively cheap to build and run has been sending shivers through Silicon Valley and Wall Street. [ Read: What really happens if China wins the AI race? ] But for all the concern about China’s advances in AI, the reality is that the country is racked by the same anxieties about the onrush of AI as the rest of the world.

Chinese social-media platforms are filled with posts in which workers and professionals express their worries that AI will steal their job and livelihood.

Leaders in Beijing seem ever more concerned about the potential political and economic risks of this technological disruption.

In the U.S., these tensions are being debated openly and, in theory, will be managed in the courts and on Capitol Hill.

In China, where there are no such avenues for people to determine their own fate, leaders must still confront the problems and threats inherent to this technological revolution.

This puts the Communist Party in a bind: Advancing AI may well empower China on the world stage, but holding the technology back may be necessary for the party to preserve itself.