Chinese AI – They're Just Like Us? With Beijing-Based Concordia AI CEO Brian Tse

**Nathan Labenz** (0:00)
Hello, and welcome back to The Cognitive Revolution. Today, I'm excited to share my conversation with Brian Tse, founder and CEO of Concordia AI, a Beijing-based social enterprise working to advance global AI safety and governance. I've been wanting to have this conversation since I first started the show, and it feels especially timely right now. Recently at The Curve in Berkeley, I participated in conversations about AI policy and the options we have available as we attempt to safely navigate the development and deployment of powerful AI systems. And I was once again struck by how many of these discussions, including with members of technical staff at Frontier Model Developers, are explicitly premised on assumptions like China will never slow down their AI development, or even in some cases, China doesn't care about AI safety. These notions are doing a lot of work in shaping American AI policy and corporate strategy. They're being used to justify everything from aggressive scaling timelines, to military partnerships, to export controls that cut China off from advanced ships. And yet, I'm not sure how well they hold up to scrutiny. I often say that AI defies all binaries. Even American politics, which is usually so rigidly polarized and partisan, often has its coalitions scrambled by AI questions. And this conversation with Brian suggests that at least to a first approximation, the US and Chinese AI ecosystems are not opposing forces, but similarly structured communities pursuing remarkably familiar goals. Both countries have mission-oriented startups using, for now at least, functionally the same architectures and training techniques to relentlessly push the AI capabilities frontier. Both have big tech companies investing huge resources in data center buildouts. Both governments are gradually waking up to the possibility of economic transformation and using industrial policy to secure their supply chains and export controls to gain leverage. And both societies are concerned about rapid disruptive change and have safety research institutes like Brian's Concordia AI emerging to study the risks and promote best practices. The differences, on the other hand, are comparatively subtle. The Chinese AI community, per Brian's telling, is less focused on AGI timelines or achieving some sort of recursive self-improvement loop or intelligence explosion and more concerned with building practical applications that serve society's needs. This view is supported by the fact that Chinese companies are in some important ways much more open than their American counterparts. In addition to making their model weights freely available to businesses and researchers worldwide, they are publishing all sorts of methods at international conferences, generally in English. And then there's China's recent refusal to purchase NVIDIA's H20 chips, even after the Trump administration made them available. If China were truly in an all-out race to AGI at any cost, as many assume, wouldn't they be buying every chip they could get their hands on? Of course, none of this rules out a hidden agenda on the Chinese side, but it should at least give us pause before assuming the worst about Chinese intentions. And this conversation goes much deeper than that, with Brian offering one of the most thorough overviews of China's AI governance landscape that you'll find anywhere. We discussed China's pre-deployment testing requirements for consumer facing AI products, which are notably stronger than any corresponding US requirement, though roughly on par or perhaps still a bit behind what American leaders are doing voluntarily on their own. We also discussed their national AI safety standards, which explicitly address catastrophic risks, including loss of control, their elevation of AI safety to a top national security concern, and the growing ecosystem of AI safety researchers across Chinese universities and institutions, who are quite naturally grappling with the same safety concerns that we are. CBRN risks, loss of control, and alignment. And developing, you guessed it, broadly similar defense-in-depth solutions. There are links in the show notes to deeply researched reports that Brian, along with Concordia team and co-authors, have produced that detail all of this activity, again, in English. Overall, to me, this doesn't sound like a country that's AGI-pilled and racing toward superintelligence with reckless abandon. If anything, as you might expect from a country run by engineers and with a living memory of revolutions, it sounds like a government that's taking a more grounded, cautious, sober approach. Of course, I do want to be very clear about my own limitations here. I've still never even been to China. I'm certainly not claiming any expertise in Chinese culture, politics, or society, and I completely understand why many in the American political establishment are worried about losing a competition for technological leadership. The stakes are indeed incredibly high. The challenges of building trust between rival great powers are immense. And as I've said many times, I wouldn't want to live in Xi's China. I value the freedoms of speech and otherwise that I have the opportunity to exercise here. But the question at hand isn't really whether China's political system is one that we would choose. It's whether China is engaged in a reckless race to AGI that forces American companies and the US government to throw caution to the wind in response. And on that question, the evidence Brian presents suggests a very different picture than many in the West assume. Of course, this conversation won't be the final word on these questions, but I do hope it's an important counterbalance to some dangerous assumptions that are currently shaping policy. And considering Brian's observation that there doesn't seem to be as much fear and paranoia about the US in Chinese AI circles as there is about China in the American AI discourse, at a minimum, I think this report from an AI safety leader on the ground in China should give one the courage to place the burden of proof on anyone who would use claims about China's approach to justify their own apparently reckless plans. And I also hope it inspires much more direct dialogue between the two countries' AI research communities.