Chang Che writes:

In January 2025, a new regime of Silicon Valley’s AI maximalists took charge of AI policy whose ethos can be summed up by a Bay Area party slogan: “Accelerate or die.” Established federal guardrails were cast off, and a global consensus was scrapped. The February 2025 AI safety summit in Paris was renamed the “AI Action Summit.” In a speech there, Vice-President J.D. Vance warned against “excessive regulation” of the AI industry and criticized those who partnered with China. It was “totally depressing,” Stuart Russell, a world-renowned AI scientist who attended, told me. “There was almost no discussion of safety — it was basically a trade show.”

Russell is a convener of the International Dialogue on AI Safety, one of over a dozen informal channels between Western countries and China through which experts and former officials meet to discuss AI’s risks. Since around 2023, these conversations, known as Track II dialogues, have kept the two countries continuously engaged with risks related to AI even when direct diplomacy has broken down. According to over a dozen people who participated in those discussions, China’s image as a more responsible shepherd of AI accelerated after Trump came to power. The release of DeepSeek in January 2025, which wiped out more than a trillion dollars in value from America’s top tech stocks, marked an inflection. That same month, a Chinese vice-premier compared AI development to a car: One couldn’t step on the accelerator “if the braking system isn’t under control.”

In 2025 and earlier this year, the Chinese government unveiled some of the most extensive regulations on artificial intelligence in the world, including rules on how AI is created and shared online and what age is permitted to use AI companion chatbots. The Shanghai government and a top Beijing university established centers dedicated to research on AI safety. Many western safety advocates who participate in Track II dialogues told me they were surprised to find that Chinese regulators seemed receptive to their suggestions. Terms germane to AI debates in the West — AI’s “catastrophic risk,” “loss of control,” and a formal grading system of AI by “level of intelligence” — now appear in official governance frameworks and Xi’s speeches. “It’s pretty crazy,” one western researcher involved in AI governance told me. China’s framework “uses the categories and the exact terminology from the International AI Safety Report.”

In July 2025, over a year after the Geneva impasse, a Track II meeting was convened by U.S., European, and Chinese technology experts in Shanghai. A member of the Chinese AI industry arrived waving a printout of Trump’s AI action plan. Written in part by the Silicon Valley venture capitalist David Sachs just days before, the missive called for American “technology dominance” and brandished its benefit to the economy and the military. Who, she implied, was the reckless power now? [Continue reading…]