Be Skeptical of an AI Security Partnership With China

Commentary

Earlier last month, the conversation over artificial intelligence changed sharply.

It began when a viral post on X from a former researcher at Anthropic and OpenAI warned that Silicon Valley is “racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives.” Jacob Coxon claimed that “the people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade.”

The immediate virality, big media attention, and seemingly pre-loaded corporate and political responses raised suspicions of an orchestrated scare campaign. Orchestrated campaigns are expensive to launch. Someone always benefits. But who?

Skepticism and hostility over AI have been growing for months, and understandably so. One major industry executive, Nvidia’s Jensen Huang, was quick to push back at certain companies developing the AI models.

The real fight is about control. Last week, the United States and China agreed to a “red phone” hotline that, in principle, will allow leaders at the national strategic levels to communicate on serious AI-related crises.

Whether the hotline is real or symbolic remains to be seen. What is clear is that any national security threat that AI poses to the United States isn’t just AI in a vacuum; it’s also defined by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), which has repeatedly weaponized AI—as it does with practically everything—to threaten U.S. interests.

Beijing is already the leading cyber-threat, outpacing all other adversaries combined. While China pledges joint cooperation with the United States on AI security, it simultaneously leverages American AI models to gut us from within.

China uses AI in its cyberattacks. Late last year, Anthropic discovered that Beijing had been using its own AI tools to infiltrate major targets around the world. The operation, according to the company, which developed the Claude AI model, was 80 percent to 90 percent automated.

The Chinese regime has a vastly different vision of humanity than the civilized world. Beijing has pioneered AI as a key tool of ruthless government monitoring and repression of its own population. Its social credit system, which rewards the compliant and ruins those who fail to obey, has made China the most high-tech dictatorship on earth.

Nothing is off-limits.

“China is harnessing AI to make its existing systems of control far more efficient and intrusive,” said Nathan Attrill, a senior analyst at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute and one of the co-authors of a report on how the CCP’s AI is reshaping human rights. “In practice, AI has become the backbone of a far more pervasive and predictive form of authoritarian control.”

Americans view tech as open and, in some AI companies’ words, “democratic,” crossing borders and governed by norms of free expression and enterprise. China is bent on replacing this vision with total political control worldwide.

China seeks to dethrone us as the world’s strongest and most dynamic economy. To get there, it has run the largest organized criminal racket in history to harvest intellectual property to close its AI gap with the United States.

The United States is finally responding in kind. The Trump administration has elevated AI to the realm of industrial policy, imposing some controls on Chinese tech and ensuring that American companies have the scale to compete globally with state-sponsored leviathans such as Huawei.

Guaranteeing a dynamic U.S. tech sector where companies can scale and merge is key to thwarting strategic threats from Beijing, which is why the Department of Justice (DOJ) recently approved a merger, with the concurrence of a federal court, between two American telecommunications companies in an industry in which the United States continues to fall behind Huawei.

The United States cannot win the AI race without a robust and global telecom infrastructure. Its companies were losing until the DOJ and the court allowed the challenge to Huawei.

The Chinese regime also recognizes the dangers inherent in AI. Beijing rolled out its first AI safety regulations five years ago. In 2023, Party boss Xi Jinping released a statement saying that China must “ensure that AI always remains under human control.”

That’s hardly reassuring, given that the CCP has always been under human control and killed tens of millions of Chinese people. But it shows the Party’s concern about the rise of its own machines. In September, the head of the Chinese Ministry of State Security published an article warning that AI could threaten the very rule of the Chinese Communist Party.

That isn’t necessarily a bad thing. As adoption costs rise and public skepticism in China grows, Trump may very well find an opening with Xi on AI security. More dangers lurk here, too. As the Soviets did with arms control, such openings almost always contain trapdoors and poison pills to hamstring the United States while others build.

Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.