Chang Che writes:

So many people had signed up for China’s premier artificial-intelligence expo in mid-July — over 200,000 by some estimates — that the ticketing system had crashed. A mob of frustrated AI enthusiasts had formed outside as a result. “How could they do this to us?” one woman cried. “Report the venue! Dial 12345!” a man hollered, evoking the Chinese equivalent of 311. A decade ago, people around the world traveled to Silicon Valley to glimpse the future. These days, they come to China. Inside the expo spanning more than 14 football fields, visitors watched robot workers assemble other robots and wandered along walls of computer chips made entirely without any American parts.

This year’s World Artificial Intelligence Conference arrived at a moment of peril and opportunity for AI. Anthropic claimed that its most powerful model, Mythos, can detect thousands of vulnerabilities in banks and telecoms infrastructure. Three states — California, Illinois, and New York — have passed laws that require top AI developers to disclose how they test for “catastrophic risks.” Historically, it was the U.S. that corralled countries to tackle the world’s stickiest technological and national security challenges, from nuclear proliferation to chemical weapons. But America’s recent about-face under President Donald Trump — toward a policy of unbridled AI dominance and a contempt for ally-making — has left a void of conscience, one that China, which has seen an eruption of AI-related industry and regulation in the past three years, was happy to fill. And so the heads of state of Cambodia, Kazakhstan, and Thailand as well as bureaucrats of AI governance, Nobel and Turing laureates, and scholars of AI security had arrived in Shanghai to discuss how to build a safer AI future. For the first time in history, it seemed as though China had become the default steward of one of humanity’s most consequential inventions.

The message from President Xi Jinping, who delivered the keynote, was that China is ready to assume its new role as the adult in the room. His predecessors used to reference AI as just one input in a broader industrial strategy. Now, AI has become a pillar of China’s organizing philosophy. Xi announced a new governance body comprising 29 countries, based in Shanghai, to standardize AI rules around the globe. He also touted an “open source” approach to AI — software whose blueprints are published for anyone to use and modify — a way of presenting Chinese AI as, ironically, more open and democratic than the closed, proprietary systems of companies like Anthropic. Certain countries, Xi said, had “overstretched” the idea of national security to wall off its technologies: a jab at U.S. export controls. This century’s technology, he implied, was safer in eastern hands than in the arms of colonialists.

For all the differences between the U.S. and China, the technology is causing a transnational rift between AI accelerationists and the promoters of AI caution. The former — which dominates Silicon Valley and, until recently, the White House — were notably few in Shanghai, and Xi knew his audience. Sitting among the rows of white linen chairs was Max Tegmark, an MIT physicist who, in 2023, organized an open letter, now signed by tens of thousands, to pause development of top-tier AI systems for six months. Back in April, he appeared at an AI safety panel together with Senator Bernie Sanders and Chinese AI researchers from Beijing. The event drew fierce backlash from the White House: Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent took to X, attacking Sanders for inviting foreigners to “tell the United States how to regulate AI.” On the AI safety portion of Xi’s speech at WAIC, Tegmark reportedly told a nearby acquaintance, “I could have written that part.”

In reality, China’s AI regulations remain inadequate: its focus is primarily on potential harms to consumers, children, and businesses, rather than assessing and tackling AI’s “frontier risks” — ways that the technology could cause large-scale existential harm. And yet the Trump administration’s abandonment of international cooperation has given China crucial room to present itself as the more scrupulous AI power. Two days after his speech, I walked through the mall next to the expo with an American scholar of AI policy, who asked not to be named. He was in a somber mood. Around us, researchers debated the latest AI capabilities and diplomats traded notes on global AI regulations. Over the course of the convention, the scholar’s fears had apparently been confirmed. “We’ve completely ceded the AI-governance agenda to China,” he told me. [Continue reading…]