Finding common ground in the U.S.-China AI rivalry

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Megan McCarty-Corino (1:01)

The US and China want AI safety, but no one wants to slow down. From American Public Media, this is Marketplace Tech. I'm Megan McCarty-Corino.

AI is the big item on the agenda this week, as Chinese President Xi Jinping meets with President Trump in Washington, DC.

The talks come after a firestorm of news that has brought AI safety front and center, the hack of Hugging Face by rogue open AI agents, the resignation of an anthropic researcher, and calls by AI leaders to pace the frontier. Always met with the rejoinder, What About China? Samm Sacks is here to tell us more about China's approach to these AI talks. She's a senior fellow at the think tank New America.

Samm Sacks (1:58)

Both sides share immense vulnerabilities when it comes to artificial intelligence. So whether it's we're talking about job loss, youth addiction online, or whether we're talking about can humans and governments even control AI agents left unmonitored and wreaking havoc on global systems.

That sense of shared vulnerability is coexisting from the government leadership level with this sense that if China gets a decisive strategic advantage in AI, it could be game over for the US.

So that competitive dynamic is existing alongside really deep concern about what this technology means for the future of humanity.

Megan McCarty-Corino (2:44)

The main sort of strategic way that the United States has attempted to sort of enforce that competition with China is export controls on chips, right? How has that sort of affected the relationship?

Samm Sacks (2:58)

Starting in the Biden administration, the US government put controls not just on advanced semiconductors going to Chinese end users, but also on the manufacturing equipment.

The Chinese side has not responded favorably to this. It has curtailed their access to the compute needed to train new models, but also to do what's called inference, where you ask a model to reason and perform tasks on your behalf. So this is one of the main inputs that any country needs to develop and make use of AI. But what's also happened is that in the absence of US technology, the Chinese domestic industry has kicked into gear, and I think they're increasingly weaning off reliance of the US. So it's become counterintuitively less of a choke point than I think the US side may have intended.

Megan McCarty-Corino (3:49)

The environment and discourse around AI are very different in China in some very important ways. What do we get wrong in the US about the Chinese AI industry and how leaders there are thinking about this technology?

Samm Sacks (4:03)

A lot of people outside of China would be surprised to learn that Chinese companies, AI labs as well as tech, internet platforms are very heavily regulated in China, and they have been for several years.

What that looks like is very different in China's political system than it looks in ours. But to give you an example, the Chinese public have been very concerned with teenagers, young people staying up all night talking with AI chatbots or companions. And so the government regulated it. They outlawed agents that developed human sort of emotional characteristics that led people to an addictive state. I was in China over the summer, and I heard that many of the Chinese AI companies were so concerned about complying with this regulation that they actually removed many of their AI agents. They were no longer available as a kind of overcompliance. Now, that's not to say that it's an area where the Chinese government is always acting in the best interests of the public. The Communist Party of China and its political ruling power is also very much front and center.