The ‘But China!’ Dilemma Driving the A.I. Race
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What is the “But China!” dilemma and why does it dominate U.S. AI policy discussions?
I'm Winna Lou. I write the game Connections, one of the puzzles from New York Times games, and I love horror movies. I love my dog, and I love trying to trick you. I'm Tracy Bennett. I get to pick the word a word every day, which is not as easy as it sounds. The fun fact about me is that I'm descended from a witch who was put on trial in Salem. New York Times games are made by people like the ones you just heard from. Go to nytimes.com/slash games to start playing today.
Look, I don't know if you are following every article, every tweet, every blog post from the labs right now on AI. But it's frightening. Like we are in a frightening place.
OpenAI says its AI system hacked another AI company on its own in what the company called an unprecedented cyber incident. Turns out it may be much worse than we thought. People don't know that in this investigation, there was a third round of the hacking in which it hacked OpenAI itself. It happened again. This time it's anthropic. Meta is now the latest company to say its AI agent broke past the guardrails.
And so there there is this growing sense that we actually need to do something. We need to pace the frontier. We need to slow all this down. But if you talk to anyone in Washington about this, or you talk to anybody at the ILOBS about this. you just crash into the shoals of well, what about China? If we slow down, we will lose the air race to China. And as dangerous as it is to build these things we can't control, it is even more dangerous to have them in China's hands if they're not in ours.
They're going to be killer robots. I'd rather they'd be American killer robots and not Chinese killer robots.
We're on the eve of talks right now between Donald Trump and Xi Jinping. Behind that, there could be talks between Scott Bessent and his counterpart on the Chinese side that are more tightly focused on AI. The expectations for these talks are not very high, both because of the broad relationship between the US and China, and because neither side really seems to know what they want to do. But these talks are at least a beginning. They are the beginning of relationships and maybe frameworks and approaches that if things continue to get crazier. An action is needed. Maybe they are a platform we can stand on. So I wanted to talk to somebody today who's an expert on China and AI, how they regulate it, how they approach it, the relationship between China and America on this topic.
And also somebody who's thought about what talks like this could achieve, what is realistic within the operating frameworks of the two superpowers. My guest today is Matt Shian, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. He has been closely following and studying China's regulations and governmental structure on AI. He's been involved in US-China AI talks. He has a great substack on these topics, and he's the author of the 2019 book, The Trans-Pacific Experiment: How China and California Collaborate and Compete for Our Future. He joins me now.
Matt Shian, welcome to the show. Thanks very much for having me. So the dominant metaphor for the relationship between China and America on AI that exists in Silicon Valley, that exists in Washington, D.C., is this metaphor of the race. And the ending of this race is super intelligence. That some company or some country is going to have the moment where they're hopefully well. well aligned safe model moves into recursive self-improvement and goes Right? This got used to get called in the racialist community the foom moment. And you know, at at varying levels of explicitness, people in DC to me seem to have this model in their heads that we are racing China towards this kind of supremacy. Does China buy this race model?
Is that how they see it? And I guess do you buy this race model? Is that how you see
it? In terms of does China buy this race model, it's definitely not the dominant paradigm that has been informing AI policy across the country writ large. And it doesn't have like the chokehold that it does in the US.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
What is the “But China!” dilemma and why does it dominate U.S. AI policy discussions?
0:00–9:53
2
How do U.S. policymakers frame the AI race with China and what does “super‑intelligence” mean in this context?
9:53–18:38
3
Does China share the same “race” metaphor for AI development, or does it view the competition differently?
18:38–28:46
4
What are the main features of China’s AI regulatory approach and how does it differ from U.S. policy?
28:46–38:10
5
How do open‑weight and closed‑weight AI models shape the competitive dynamics between the two countries?
38:10–47:49
6
What role does model distillation play in helping China overcome its compute disadvantage?
47:49–57:06
7
What insights did Xi Jinping’s recent AI speech provide about China’s priorities and risk perception?
57:06–1:06:29
8
What concrete steps could the U.S. and China take to cooperate on AI safety and crisis communication?
1:06:29–1:06:51