Eric Schmidt · White House · Google · China · U.S. · CIA · The Atlantic Technology
As China ships ever more capable AI models—ones that compete with Silicon Valley’s top offerings—many American AI
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As China releases ever more capable AI models—ones that compete with Silicon Valley’s top offerings—many American AI and national-security researchers have been arguing, loudly and forcefully, that the world should fear Chinese AI supremacy.
Key facts
- David Edelman, an AI-policy researcher at MIT who previously served on President Obama’s National Security Council, told me — They could develop bioweapons that “target specific ethnic groups, e.g. anybody but Han Chinese,” as one influential AI white paper put it in 2024
- Rama Elluru, a senior director at the Special Competitive Studies Project, a nonpartisan think tank founded by the former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, suggested to me that Chinese AI models could be used
- As China releases ever more capable AI models—ones that compete with Silicon Valley’s top offerings—many American AI and national-security researchers have been arguing, loudly and forcefully
Summary
They could develop bioweapons that “target specific ethnic groups, e.g. anybody but Han Chinese,” as one influential AI white paper put it in 2024. At the same time, it’s worth taking a breath to consider how much these dire imagined futures are getting ahead of where things stand. But fears about China using AI for swift global domination assume that the technology will advance to a kind of superintelligence: AI models smart enough to develop smarter bots themselves, which would lead whichever country controls them to enter “escape velocity where your adversaries aren’t able to catch up,” David Lin, a senior director at the SCSP who previously covered China and technology at the CIA, told me.
The technological race between the U.S. and China is so often discussed as a winner-takes-all competition. China is an obvious rival to the United States, as most former Biden-administration and current Trump-administration officials would agree.