Silicon Valley China hawks, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei among them, fear the country surpassing US’s AI lead as much as superintelligence destroying humanity.
When reporters asked Donald Trump this week if he supported calls to slow down the development of artificial intelligence out of fears for cybersecurity, public safety and the fate of humanity, he said no. His argument: China.
The US is in a technological race with China, companies including Anthropic and OpenAI have argued, and any regulation that would cede the contest risks incalculable economic and political harm.
Even as Dario Amodei, Anthropic’s CEO, led an industry-wide call this week to “pace the frontier”, he declared that the US could only slow down to the point where China could not catch up.
The AI industry’s concerns about China may come with self-serving economic incentives, but they also reflect a strain of hawkish foreign policy toward Beijing that has become entrenched in tech.
In recent years, parts of Silicon Valley have positioned themselves as the vanguard in a new cold war with China, arguing that the industry’s technological advancements are essential to both US hegemony and the liberal world order.
The Anthropic CEO has argued for years that one of the reasons he’s so animated to advance AI is to ensure that the technology falls into the hands of Democratic governments and not regimes such as China.
Demis Hassabis, the leader of Google Deepmind, has made few public remarks on China in comparison with his peers.
Anthropic is a different story, said Kyle Chan, a fellow at the Brookings Institution.