China Has No Use for AI Doomerism
· The Atlantic
AI is everywhere in China. In Hangzhou, humanoid police robots wearing fluorescent-yellow vests patrol tourist hot spots, gently admonishing jaywalkers. The Chinese AI chatbot Doubao is such a popular source of medical advice that citizens have begun to call the service “Doctor Doubao.” The authoritarian country is marshaling the state’s resources behind building a world-leading AI industry and pushing for the technology to be adopted across crucial sectors, including manufacturing, energy, and agriculture. Meanwhile, leaders are calling for a nationwide effort to nurture AI breakthroughs, adopting Cold War language last used when the country sought to develop a nuclear weapon.
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Encouraged by a steady drumbeat of state propaganda, the Chinese population has largely come to see AI, like previous waves of digital disruption, as a means of easing everyday life while also creating new jobs and industries. Polls indicate that the country is among the nations most excited about the prospects of AI, and doomers are tough to find.
[Read: What AI anxiety looks like in China]
So when the American tech sector reached a new level of AI panic last week, across the Pacific Ocean, the Chinese AI community largely shrugged—including the very people working on the technology’s safety.
Chinese engineers and AI-safety experts I spoke with told me that although they recognize the existential safety risks of AI, they feel that losing control of the technology is a distinctly American challenge—for now. They’re far more preoccupied with catching up to U.S. AI models, which, despite the best efforts of Chinese companies such as DeepSeek and Moonshot AI, continue to lead in overall benchmarks. With the United States and China in a race to develop the most cutting-edge technologies, many in China also saw Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei’s proposal calling for an intentional slowdown in AI development as self-serving and driven by the geopolitical rivalry between the two countries.
Amodei’s post, which fueled the AI panic across Silicon Valley, capped a whirlwind two months of cybersecurity breaches by agentic models from top U.S. and Chinese labs. It also attracted rare consensus from Amodei’s biggest rivals—OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and the SpaceXAI founder Elon Musk—and ignited a debate among industry executives, national-security hawks, and lawmakers. President Trump dismissed the warnings as a “SICK conspiracy,” while Republicans and Democrats clashed over proposed regulation.
In China, the loudest voices commenting on the AI panic have come from state media and nationalist news commentators, who framed the outrage as just another ploy to delay China’s AI progress. Global Times, a state-owned media outlet run by the Chinese Communist Party, called the Anthropic executive’s warnings part of a “Cold War playbook” in a global AI race and singled out Amodei’s call for greater export controls to keep advanced chips out of China’s hands. “From the Chinese perspective, Dario’s proposal that China ‘pace the frontier’ seems hypocritical,” Kwan Yee Ng, an analyst at Concordia AI, a Beijing-based consultancy focused on AI safety, told me. “The country views itself as already being held back by the very export controls Amodei endorses.”
The Chinese technology giant Huawei’s rotating chairperson, Xu Zhijun, told reporters that Chinese AI might not be powerful enough to encounter the same type of catastrophic safety risks that U.S. companies fear. Xu’s view is commonly held within the industry. One Chinese AI-software entrepreneur, who asked for anonymity because of the sensitive nature of the topic, told me that although cybersecurity is a constant concern, businesses are less concerned about losing control of AI models. “It’s so competitive here, and everyone is focused on bettering their own product. No one has the time to dwell on those issues,” he said. China is still playing catch-up, he added. If anyone’s going to lose control of AI first, he claimed, it will be the Americans.
Another Chinese developer I spoke with who also asked for anonymity in order to speak openly, echoed the broader sense of AI optimism within China. A Stanford University industry report published this year cited polls showing that 84 percent of Chinese respondents said products and services that use AI made them excited. That’s compared with 53 percent of the global average, and 38 percent of people in the U.S. The developer told me that many of his peers tended to be “tech optimists” and didn’t subscribe to the same timelines for artificial general intelligence as Silicon Valley. Amodei’s warnings on AI misalignment are valuable insider signals, he said, but without more empirical evidence, it’s hard to get worked up.
Part of the dismissive attitude is driven, it seems, by a broadly held suspicion of Amodei. The Anthropic CEO has repeatedly pushed for tight export controls to hold back China’s AI development and lobbied U.S. policy makers to clamp down on “unauthorized distillation” practices by major Chinese labs. That’s made him a controversial figure in the AI-developer community in China, despite the fact that Claude Code is widely used in the industry there. Last week, the DeepSeek engineer Liu Shengyu went viral on Chinese social media for a post that called on frontier AI to remain open and affordable, while also taking a personal shot at Amodei’s company. The prospect of Anthropic monopolizing the most advanced AI or AGI, Liu argued, was as severe as “Hitler acquiring atomic weapons before the Allies.” (Liu has since clarified that his views were personal and not representative of DeepSeek.)
Another reason for the subdued reaction in China has to do with how AI companies there are structured. For the most part, they tend to be leaner and more resource-constrained than their U.S counterparts, which have teams devoted to long-term alignment and AI safety. To the extent that they have AI-safety resources, Chinese teams devote them to satisfying regulatory requirements, such as data security and filtering politically sensitive material. “The dynamics of AI safety is different in the U.S. and China,” Zilan Qian, a research scholar at GovAI, a think tank focused on helping governments navigate advanced AI, told me. “In the U.S., the labs and companies mainly drive the AI-safety discussion. In China, the government plays a central role in setting the AI-safety agenda and putting out regulation. Then the tech companies comply.”
That’s not to say Chinese officials are completely unaware of AI risks. In recent months, multiple top Chinese politicians have sounded the alarm. Last week, Chen Yixin, the head of China’s state security agency, wrote in a public letter that AI was a serious threat to regime stability and required tighter scrutiny and control. And in July, President Xi Jinping warned about the risks of AI and pushed for multilateral cooperation in AI governance. China’s cyberspace regulator recently released an annual update of its AI Safety Governance Framework to include a hefty section about the risks from autonomous agents and the increased capabilities of frontier models.
For all of the problems associated with America’s laissez-faire approach, China illustrates the opposite concern. Chinese officials worried about misinformation and losing control of the public discourse introduced some of the world’s tightest restrictions on the nascent technology. Generative-AI models in China are trained on data aligned with the party’s political ideology to ensure that the answers generated hold its worldview. China has also harnessed AI to create the world’s largest digital police state, with millions of surveillance cameras mounted on streets scanning faces or analyzing citizens’ every move.
Compare that with the U.S., where both the Trump administration and prominent Silicon Valley investors and businessmen have pushed against the notion of a comprehensive federal AI law. As a result, various states and agencies have filled the gap with laws to govern the use of the technology, including rules covering deepfakes, data-governance statutes, and algorithms that dictate health-care decisions.
Misalignment and loss of control of AI might not be a concern in China now, but in six months to a year, things could shift, Malo Bourgon, the head of the Machine Intelligence Research Institute, told me. As China catches up, the country’s tech scene might face similar moments of panic.
In the meantime, Trump and Xi will meet this week in Washington for talks on topics including AI. A notification system for AI safety between the two tech superpowers has been proposed. Ultimately, the geopolitical and economic competition between the U.S. and China means that each side is looking at the other with suspicion. It’s unlikely the two of them will agree on much, other than a belief that no slowdown is needed.