If AI really could kill us all, why give any ground to China?

China isn’t messing around. The government recently unveiled a comprehensive strategy to make China the world’s AI leader by the end of this decade — a roadmap that includes massive, coordinated funding and resources on a scale that one-party rule makes significantly easier. Sure, the Chinese Communist Party is prone to hyperbole, but the country’s leaders view AI as an existential threat to their power, and they’re throwing the kitchen sink at the problem. They’re already catching up to the United States. Meanwhile, the American AI industry says it wants to tap the brakes on its own development. Their fear is a different one: Silicon Valley is building a technology that could outstrip its makers’ control and eventually destroy humanity. The likelihood and capability of AI’s destructive power is hotly debated and inconclusive. But the United States and China are nevertheless locked in an arms race that mirrors the Cold War’s nuclear standoff — the most dire of threats that forced the bitterest of enemies to come to the table and establish rules to protect humanity, even as both sides possessed enough power to blow up the world multiple times over. Both the United States and China are feverishly debating the correct balance of AI regulation and technological advancement, and each side has distinct advantages in the race. Meanwhile, the global industry appears to be nearing a crucial, if ill-defined tipping point that could force developers and political leaders to reckon with AI’s power. What China is capable of America’s early AI lead has eroded. The US government did what it could to maintain an advantage, restricting China from accessing top-of-the-line AI chips. That created serious obstacles for the country’s AI models. But China’s AI companies developed a remarkable strategy to overcome that hurdle. “They couldn’t catch up with Americans because they didn’t have the most advanced chips, so they made their software better and more power efficient,” said David Bellman, product lead at SynMax, a data intelligence company. In February 2025, China’s DeepSeek AI model trailed OpenAI’s top model by just 0.4% in benchmark testing, a gigantic leap forward from previous models. Since then, Chinese and US models have been neck and neck, according to Stanford University’s 2026 AI Index report, which argued the US-China AI model performance gap is “effectively closed.” The United States continues to hold major advantages in frontier-model production, private investment and data center infrastructure, noted Andrew Chin, an AI law professor at the University of North Carolina. So which country is “ahead” depends heavily on how you’re measuring. But China is ceding nothing. In 2025, it unveiled its New Generation Artificial Intelligence Development Plan, a pathway to AI leadership that leverages the country’s party-run tech industry and government agencies to build out its infrastructure and train large language models. Among its goals: supercharge the Chinese economy to make it the world leader in transformative technology, including batteries, robots and automation. “Central planning has allowed China to rapidly develop its sovereign technology and expand its global influence,” said University of Virginia National Security Data and Policy Institute researchers in a white paper published shortly after China introduced its policy. But China’s strategy also contains some distinct disadvantages: Its AI invites political favoritism and encourages bias in its outputs, noted the UVA researchers. That’s because the country’s main fear resides not in the extinction of humanity but the threat to the Communist Party’s power. Its regulation of AI is mostly ideological, focusing mainly on the restriction of what the AI shares with its users and expanding the political control of the party. That fear is evident in an article published Sunday by China’s State Security Minister Chen Yixin in the state-run China Cyberspace magazine. Chen warned that the country must maintain dominance in and control of AI, cautioning that the party could lose power over its people if it fails. The United States could use AI to gain a cybersecurity or espionage advantage over China, or the technology could be used to launch a propaganda war against the party, Chen argued. US efforts to rein in AI Meanwhile, the American AI industry is at least giving lip service to self-regulation. AI leaders are meeting with politicians about reining in the technology, but President Donald Trump has said such efforts are conceding to hoaxes and conspiracy theories — and will offer a major concession to China. It’s unclear how steadfast the industry will remain in its stated efforts to slow down its development or how much it believes its technology can really cause the human race harm. Skeptics note the American AI industry faces steep hurdles to gaining sufficient computing abilities to give its technology the power needed for truly destructive behavior. America’s data center buildout effort lags far behind the industry’s ambitious goals to increase its computing power. Shortages in labor, building supplies, high-end chips and permits, in addition to rising interest rates and public antipathy to data centers, have caused wide-scale data center construction delays. “Those are fundamental problems that could torpedo tech business models,” noted Darrell West, senior fellow of governance studies at the Brookings Institution. But the fact of the matter is: No one really knows how much computing power is needed for AI to kill everyone. “Anyone who tells you that once we reach such and such capacity, disaster happens, and up to that point we’re safe, is lying,” said Vincent Conitzer, computer science professor at Carnegie Mellon. “For all we know, with some clever ideas added, today’s capacity is already enough.” That’s why advocates for AI regulation believe the efforts to rein in the technology must begin irrespective of the industry’s anticipated X date for reaching a level of artificial intelligence that could be destructive. “Infrastructure delays may give us breathing room, but breathing room is not governance,” said Chin, the AI law professor. What global regulation might look like Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei argued in an open letter this weekend that the United States must maintain dominance over China in AI capabilities, but the pace of US innovation shouldn’t exceed what’s needed to outpace its rival. That will give the American industry time to ensure AI isn’t dangerous while creating leverage over China to force it to the negotiating table to form some kind of global regulation. “If we slow down by more than this amount, then (unpaced) Chinese Communist Party-associated projects will pull ahead, creating significant national security risk,” Amodei said. “Some may believe these measures make it more difficult to cooperate with China, but I believe the opposite is true: these measures increase the leverage held by democracies and make an agreement more likely in the future.” China appears unenthused by Amodei’s proposal. An editorial in state-owned tabloid Global Times called the open letter a “Cold War playbook.” Nevertheless, China, perhaps even more than the United States, also fears out-of-control AI that could act outside of the government’s control. It, too, recognizes the dire need to rein in the technology to ensure it acts within its bounds. “Beijing likely has its own deep concerns about AI’s potential to destabilize its social and political system,” said Philip Potter, executive director of the University of Virginia’s National Security Data and Policy Institute. That’s why a spirit of cooperation may be in the best interests of both countries’ governments and industries, and arrangements where both countries restrain private-sector AI development while walling off AI development as a state and national security enterprise could be something both countries’ governments and private industries agree to, Potter said. The alternative is a self-justifying arms race, Chin argues: If each country believes it must maintain a strategic advantage, then no one can have a safety policy. “There is certainly a legitimate national-security interest in preventing a strategic competitor from obtaining a decisive technological advantage,” Chin said. “But there is also a national-security interest in not creating systems whose behavior, objectives or downstream effects we cannot reliably understand or control.”