China Positions Itself as AI Governance Leader as US-China AI Competition Takes Unexpected Turn

What Really Happens If China Wins the AI Race?

For years, the tech industry has portrayed Chinese AI development as an existential threat. The truth is not so straightforward. 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. The outcomes they envision are catastrophic. I spoke with a number of such experts recently, and they warned of bots that could devise an impenetrable missile-defense system that makes obsolete America's nuclear arsenal, or manufacture an endless drone army that overwhelms American defenses. 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 to create "engineered humans," akin to Marvel's Captain America. Perhaps anything is possible. At a moment when AI models are self-directing massive security breaches and designing novel pathogens, when Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei is warning about an "AI-enabled totalitarian nightmare" led by China, the worst-case scenarios can seem closer and closer. Read: It may be time to panic about AI At the same time, it's worth taking a breath to consider how much these dire imagined futures are getting ahead of where things actually stand. A struggle really is, of course, playing out among the U.S., China, and any number of other nations over whether democracy or authoritarianism will be the dominant global influence. Both the United States and China have a history of launching propaganda campaigns against each other; the Chinese government is reportedly starting a concerted effort to be the source of more AI training data, in part so that it can embed its views, such as over the status of Taiwan, into chatbots worldwide. 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. It is not clear that such an omniscient digital being can or will be built. The White House has further muddled matters by taking a series of contradictory stances toward Chinese technology. It has, for example, revised its policy on exports to more easily allow the sale of advanced AI chips to China, while also going back and forth on whether the Pentagon and U.S. intelligence agencies can use the most advanced AI models of Anthropic. How seriously can anyone take the idea that the two nations are locked in a "hot Cold War II," to quote Palantir chief technology officer Shyam Sankar, when the government is arguably enabling China's own AI ambitions? The technological race between the U.S. and China is so often discussed as a winner-takes-all competition. But such a narrow framing obscures what's most at stake for Americans. China is an obvious rival to the United States, as most former Biden-administration and current Trump-administration officials would agree. But that also makes "China" a convenient boogeyman for AI lobbyists and those with a clear financial interest in the industry, such as the former White House AI adviser David Sacks, who has said that "the AI race is even more important than the Space Race." From the June 2026 issue: The venture-capital populist The two countries are not at war, but the most hawkish AI executives and national-security officials nonetheless fear that AI could confer what in military terms is called a "decisive strategic advantage." Here is where the Cold War analogies come in. Such an advantage would entail the ability to land some sort of crushing blow that your opponent cannot recover from, "as if one country had nuclear weapons and no other country did, or maybe an even more extreme version of that," Kyle Chan, a fellow at the Brookings Institution's John L. Thornton China Center, told me. Plenty of reasons exist to be cautious of this framing. For starters, to accept this argument, one has to assume that very soon, bots will exist that are smarter than the pooled expertise of entire nations. That's total speculation, so the war-gaming can amount to "choose your own adventure," R. David Edelman, an AI-policy researcher at MIT who previously served on President Obama's National Security Council, told me. Some pragmatic issues also exist. Software alone can't win wars: The Pentagon is reportedly using AI models to speed up its target selection in Iran, but no matter how smart those bots are, America nonetheless is not exactly winning the war. Iran, for its part, seems to be hacking America's water utilities -- but those water systems are small and separate from one another, and have built-in physical redundancies. For similar reasons, a hack of a grid or bank would have serious but, in some ways, limited repercussions. These are all grave threats, to be sure, but they are not civilization-ending. And translating any future ideas from AI into the physical world could take years. Even if AI cracked the code to create super soldiers, the military would have to figure out how to incubate and grow them, or else edit genes in adults without killing them. An AI system might say, Here's how to defend against nukes, but that would leave the issue of building thousands or millions of missile interceptors on the table. In part for these reasons, no single AI-conferred advantage is likely to be large enough to permit any country to conquer the world. "It strains credibility that six months of advantage in AI could be the difference between the U.S. winning and losing a war with any adversary," Edelman said. In any case, the technology's military capabilities might matter less than its effects on the economy. AI models are released as products. The top models from Chinese AI companies, including Moonshot AI, Z.ai, DeepSeek, and Alibaba, are by all accounts almost as good as and far cheaper to use than offerings from OpenAI, Anthropic, or Google. Simply put, that makes Chinese AI more economical for many companies looking to adopt the technology. Indeed, relative to the U.S., China's government and businesses are "moving very fast," Chan said. If this is an economic race rather than a war, then it's one that the United States could very well lose. "I don't think I've ever heard any executives or researchers describe their work as part of a national contest against the United States," Grace Shao, an analyst who covers AI and China and the author of the newsletter AI Proem, told me. Instead, "the more important race in China may be the race to diffuse AI into the real economy." China's biggest advantage in the AI race comes from the physical world. This has little to do with AI itself: Decades of being a manufacturing powerhouse and implementing targeted industrial policy have made the country a leader in producing renewable-energy equipment, electric vehicles, robots, and other complex technologies. The country manufactures some 90 percent of all of the crucial components in solar panels. Last year, nearly 90 percent of humanoid robots sold were Chinese. Meanwhile, the U.S. is failing to meet AI's electricity demands and has struggled to resupply missiles during the war in Iran. Tom Nichols: Iran, not Trump, is in control of this war "China has this strategy of exporting its technology globally," Elluru said. Through its Belt and Road Initiative, China has helped build highways, ports, power plants, fiber-optic cables, and data centers throughout Asia, Africa, and Latin America; AI services are the logical next offering. The concern, for the U.S., is that "this technology sphere of influence congeals into political alignment" with Beijing, Daniel Remler, a senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security who previously led AI policy at the State Department, told me. For instance, dependence on Chinese technology makes it more likely for a government to support Chinese efforts on the global stage and vote with China at the United Nations. Several nations benefiting from these investments have sided with China in its mission to claim Taiwan. China has been accused of using ports, e-commerce platforms, and telecommunications networks in other countries to hoover up data. Already the nation is using AI to enhance its domestic-surveillance apparatus and further crack down on dissent; the spread of Chinese data centers and AI agents abroad could only expand that authoritarian web. National-security analysts are concerned that, in the case of military conflict, China could threaten to shut off partner nations' digital communications or power grids -- including in countries with a large American-military presence. The greatest threat of Chinese "artificial general intelligence" is not some sudden death blow so much as a hastening of the ongoing decline of American hegemony -- and the freedoms, at home and around the globe, that at its best the U.S. seeks to enshrine. Yet the Trump administration and AI industry's approach to competing with China has been a mess. The White House spokesperson Liz Huston told me that "the United States leads the world in AI innovation, and President Trump will keep it that way." The administration's current policies on AI chips, Chinese-made robot parts, advanced cybersecurity models, and open-weight AI are one big contradictory jumble. At a summit this spring, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth stressed "rightful alarm regarding China's historic military buildup" just weeks after President Trump visited Beijing and said the nations would have a "fantastic future together." OpenAI, Anthropic, Nvidia, and the like can't seem to agree on what they are lobbying for, either. All of which would seem like a great way to lose a technological race with China, any way you measure it. There's a certain déjà-vu quality to the AI race. Amid fears over Sputnik and nuclear proliferation, a report prepared at the direction of Henry Kissinger in 1958 declared that "should we ever allow the U.S.S.R. and Communist China to attain strategic superiority, we can be certain that subsequent events will be brutal." According to a government report on the early years of the Advanced Research Projects Agency, "fervent belief in unending scientific progress" offered a way forward. Those words could have been written today by Amodei, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, or Secretary of State Marco Rubio. And indeed, this belief propelled America into many decades of technological advancement -- in nuclear weapons, space exploration, computer systems, and more. Even back then, that agency, known today as DARPA, was quietly championing an emerging research area called artificial intelligence. J. C. R. Licklider, who championed the use of computer systems at ARPA in the early 1960s following the inspiration of Vannevar Bush, imagined that one day, machines that "will outdo the human brain" could make essentially all decisions of "military significance." And ARPA developed the precursor to today's internet. Today's AI race also traces back to the 2010s, when Silicon Valley began invoking China as a way to shape regulation. The idea of a technological arms race has "been wielded deliberately as a way to head off any attempts at regulating the tech sector" and, more recently, to champion "favorable industrial policy" for data-center construction, Sarah Myers West, a co-executive director of the AI Now Institute and former senior adviser on AI at the Federal Trade Commission, told me. In 2018, while testifying before Congress, Mark Zuckerberg said that "if we make it too hard for American companies to innovate in areas like facial recognition, then we will lose to Chinese companies." A few years later, a dozen former national-security officials wrote a letter to Congress arguing that "antitrust proposals that target specific American technology firms" risked "undermining America's key advantage vis-à-vis China." Today Silicon Valley is instead using the specter of China to angle for more and better AI, in more places, and faster. American officials and tech executives are not wrong to want to compete. But the dominance of an oversimplified U.S.-China AI race, without clarity about who is racing and to where, doesn't just mangle policy making; it obscures that the ultimate beneficiary of the AI boom ought to be citizens, not military contractors or Silicon Valley's biggest corporations and investors. Rather than asking what kind of AI we're building, Myers West said, one could ask, What kind of society are we building? The AI-accelerated spread of authoritarianism, within and outside of China's borders, should be reason enough to worry. And if American AI executives and White House officials really cared about free-market competition, they might explore enforcing antitrust laws to separate the providers of AI models, data centers, and chips. If they were truly concerned about AI surveillance, they might look into finally passing some sort of federal digital-privacy legislation. And if they cared about spreading democratic AI abroad, they might take a close look at the state of democracy at home.

Who Gets to Write the Rules on AI?

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 and coordination. 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 truth, 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 time to present itself as the more cautious 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. There was a time, during Joe Biden's presidency, when the U.S. was widely seen by the world's AI researchers as the more responsible superpower, one that could be trusted to lead the rest of the world toward effective safety regulation. At the 2024 summit in Geneva, the first high-profile AI dialogue between the U.S. and China, Biden officials came prepared to talk about AI's frontier risks. To their surprise, the Chinese steered the discussion to negotiating U.S. export controls instead. In part, this was because the two countries' AI communities have historically held divergent views of AI risks: Members of the American AI world tend to see the technology through a telescope: They see perils and benefits to the whole of humanity. Their Chinese counterparts apply a magnifying glass: They see, up close, a larger breadth of risks to social order, data security, and childhood formation. Ultimately, the Geneva summit ended in gridlock. Biden ended his tenure in office with a meager, nonbinding consensus: that humans, not machines, would retain control over the use of nuclear weapons. Then Trump took office. 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? In the five years I lived in China, I watched as a distinctly Chinese vision of the future took shape. Humanoid robots decorate shopping malls, raised by a vast industrial ecosystem helmed by Xi, China's top venture capitalist. Video games and China's version of TikTok are time-limited for minors -- though kids have found work-arounds -- and algorithms feed children science experiments and museum tours instead of engagement bait. The same watchdog that manages censorship enforces the labeling of AI-generated content, so while Chinese users cannot find info on the 1989 crackdowns in Tiananmen, they are increasingly guarded from deepfake deception. Surprisingly, the Chinese public seems to have largely acquiesced: It trusts that this all-powerful state obsessed with social stability and childhood formation will safeguard one of the most significant technologies of the future. China has excelled at advancing AI regulation primarily by focusing on near-term harms -- deepfakes, algorithmic bias, and the emotional toll of AI companions. But the exponential increase in AI capabilities have revealed certain gaps in the Chinese governance structure. The regulator of AI models is an office known as the Cyberspace Administration, the chief mandate of which is not to probe risks of large-scale AI disasters but to examine content that violates "socialist core values." Only five out of ten Chinese AI models this year published broader safety evaluations, routine protocols employed by many U.S. labs that test how good an AI system is at hacking and building biological weapons. Despite China's pageantry at the WAIC, its AI labs have yet to offer sufficient protection against grave, planet-level AI threats, which seem increasingly possible. "We don't see any evidence that leading Chinese companies are doing the actual testing that's needed" to deal with frontier AI risks, Matt Sheehan, an AI policy analyst at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, told me. One year in on the Trump administration's AI blitzkrieg, rapid AI breakthroughs are also testing the U.S.'s resolve. The release of Anthropic's Fable 5, a version of Mythos that some American firms have reportedly called a "superweapon," was initially barred from release by the government. More recently, OpenAI reported that one of its own models had hacked into another company during an internal test for hacking capabilities. After years of dismissing AI safety precautions as needless shackles, Trump's team has abruptly tried to pivot to a more security-minded posture: In June, the White House issued an executive order establishing a voluntary review process for top AI models. Even as the U.S. and China have built radically different systems for governing AI, increasingly powerful models are pushing them toward the same questions. The biggest win of Track II dialogues over the past few years, participants say, is a growing consensus, and a shared vocabulary, about what AI is and how it can go wrong -- a precondition for AI diplomacy. Fears over AI's cyberoffensive capacities are part of what led to a breakthrough between Trump and Xi, when the U.S. and China agreed to restart discussions about AI safety and governance, set to take place in September. Whether Washington and Beijing can come to any agreement is a different matter. Recent proposals for a global AI standards body, overseen by the U.S. government, would be a nonstarter for Chinese officials, who have created their own AI governance body. Another proposal, called "AI safety in parallel," enjoins the two nations to share information about AI's dangers but falls short of imposing standardized safety measures. For all its anxieties surrounding China's vision of the future, the rest of the world remains unsure America, at this point, can offer a brighter alternative. In early June, I sat for a coffee with a Chinese scholar in Beijing who had participated in numerous Track II discussions with his American counterparts. During the Biden administration, Chinese officials felt that they were simply being asked to sign onto what the Americans had already determined, he told me. But the Trump administration "upended everything from the past." For decades after the death of Mao Zedong, the Chinese had described America as a beacon of individual freedom and democracy. When it comes to AI governance, the scholar told me, "there are no beacons anymore."