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What China wants from AI

Chinese President Xi Jinping and US President Donald Trump in the White House on September 24, 2026. | Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images The national conversation about AI in the US is full of fear: fear about AI’s potential to end humanity, fear of data centers moving in, fear that government officials will do absolutely nothing even as the industry pleads for regulation, you name it. But the AI conversation looks remarkably different across the Pacific. In China, driven by public enthusiasm and a state-backed push for AI dominance, the country is in the midst of a large-scale AI integration into all facets of its society, driven by Chinese leader Xi Jinping’s support for the technology. “He’s super AI-pilled,“ said Kyle Chan, an expert on China’s technology development and industrial policy at the Brookings Institution. “When you look at his speeches, when you look at Chinese policy documents, everything is about rolling AI out to as many domains as possible: manufacturing, services, education, healthcare, pharmaceuticals, and of course the military. Everything is about trying to integrate AI.” Beneath this push for a high-speed AI adoption across Chinese society lies a regulatory framework designed to safeguard political stability and keep boundaries on the kind of information AI models are able to share. Chan joined Vox’s Today, Explained podcast to speak with co-host Sean Rameswaram about the different AI anxieties in the US and China, and whether joint regulations on AI safety are possible while the two countries are engaged in an AI arms race. Below is an excerpt of their conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full podcast, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify. One thing that really struck me about the way the Chinese government is approaching AI is that China has this explicit goal, right? China has some concrete plans to boost AI adoption through the country, including its recent AI-plus initiative. And their goal is to try to boost the penetration of AI in so-called terminal devices, everything from computers to smartphones, to 90 percent or more by 2030.  It’s going really fast and it is, in part, a state mobilization effort. There are state-owned companies, there are government agencies that are trying to integrate AI, but also there’s just an enthusiasm from the general population. If you look at surveys like the latest Gallup poll, people in China are much more enthusiastic and positive about how AI might help them and help the country. It’s quite a striking contrast with what you see in the US in terms of attitudes towards AI. Because people here are worried about AI as an existential threat. People here are worried about AI taking their jobs, people here are worried about AI data centers in their backyards. Is that not the vibe in China? Not so much. There is some concern about AI and jobs. But in general, China’s not worried about AI wiping out humanity. You really don’t hear that from the Chinese policymakers. There’s no talk about a P(doom), the probability that AI will wipe out humanity. So this is just a different approach to AI risk in general. And why not the existential risk?  You know, one factor, I think, is sci-fi and the culture.  Huh. We’ve watched too many movies? It seems like every major sci-fi book or film involves machines trying to kill us all, and I think that that idea has become very prevalent.  When you imagine a future with AI, that is one of the primary futures that people imagine, versus in China, I think a lot of the attitude towards technology in general, not just AI, is about using this edge to keep up and to become more competitive.  For a lot of people in China, technology was something that they saw transform their lives in real time. And Chinese leaders think it’s the key to China’s future modernization and transformation to a global superpower. Let’s talk about what concerns there are. One of the biggest concerns that Chinese political leaders have when it comes to AI is political and social instability. They don’t want AI-generated content to act the way that social media or the internet broadly could, which is to disseminate information, maybe deepfakes, maybe viral news that could threaten the [Chinese Communist Party’s] hold on power. For AI-generated content, it was about making sure that the models didn’t say the wrong things about sensitive topics. A lot of this is about social and political risk rather than about existential technological risk per se.  From pretty early on, China has been developing a model registration system where basically AI services have to be vetted in advance and go through a battery of tests where they’re asked sensitive political questions and they’re supposed to either not answer them or say the “right thing” before they are officially registered. And once they’re registered, then they can be released to the public. So it’s a pretty tight regulatory framework for controlling things like political content. We know that there’s a high unemployment rate in China, especially among young people, which is also a great concern of the government. Are people worried that this bullish approach to AI could affect employment numbers? Yes and no. On the one hand, China is actually facing this demographic problem with a shrinking labor force. Fewer people want to go into, say, factory jobs, but China still wants to make everything the world wants to buy.  They see AI as a partial solution to that, a way to automate things like manufacturing. On the other hand, though, there are growing concerns in China about job loss. And you see also some recent court cases in China where they basically are telling employers, you cannot use AI as a reason to fire workers.  But I think overall, what they’re trying to do is they’re trying to find this balance between the diffusion of the technology and trying to prevent any kind of large-scale protest movement that might arise from sudden mass unemployment of, say, factory workers or food delivery drivers. And President Xi was of course here in Washington last week. From the limited photos we have of the state dinner or of President Trump and President Xi on the tarmac, everything looks so chummy, even though we are so clearly in a cold war with China over AI. The president’s always talking about how he wants to win.  Was there tension in his visit to Washington last week? Did you notice any? The weird thing is that just between these two men, there seems to be this kind of romance where Trump really fawns over Xi Jinping.  I think he has tremendous respect, even admiration, for Xi Jinping’s grip on power and control over the government apparatus in general.  What is happening under the surface, though, is continuing tensions and a deep competitive structural relationship. That involves especially competition in AI. AI has emerged as a new fault line of competition between the US and China, one that could come to define the relationship going forward.  I think that on the one hand, they’re talking about cooperation on things like AI safety and AI risk. On the other hand, there’s a whole bunch of issues where the US wants to lead. China wants to also get ahead. And when it comes to things like distillation or cyber capabilities, it’s as zero-sum as it’s ever been. Who’s winning? It depends on what you’re looking at and how you define winning. If you’re talking about the best models, for sure the US. And virtually everyone in China would agree, right? In fact, Anthropic’s Claude is very popular in China, even though technically Anthropic bans its use in China. But aren’t their open-source models kind of popular here? Yes, exactly. Chinese open-source models are getting more popular in the US, especially at a time when some of the capabilities are so incredible that most normal people don’t really need them, and they also don’t want to pay for the most advanced and most expensive models. Ultimately it’s this weird sort of cooperation and competition at the same time. American models are popular in China. Chinese models are popular in America. We’re at each other’s throats, but quietly, politely. Does the cold war make it all but certain that safety isn’t going to really be a chief priority for either country until something terrible happens? The fierce level of competition and the very, very deep distrust between the two countries makes any kind of cooperation on AI safety very, very difficult. Even just talking to each other, having the US and China establish an official AI dialogue, which apparently they’ve agreed to, is seen as a huge first step, even though they’re just talking.  There’s a long, long road to go before we can even think about something like an arms control treaty or a broader international agreement about AI and AI safety. But I think that’s what some people, especially in Silicon Valley, are trying to jump to.

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