China has become the biggest question in one of AI’s most important debates.
The debate took on a new dimension this week after China’s top intelligence official published a rare essay warning that advanced AI poses major risks and requires stronger oversight, even as Beijing pushes to become a global AI leader.
The comments came days after Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei reignited the debate over “pacing the frontier.” He argued that leading AI labs should slow the development of the most powerful models so safety can catch up, while maintaining a sufficient US lead over China through measures such as export controls and stronger AI security.
The debate also comes ahead of President Donald Trump’s White House meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping, with AI emerging as a key issue in US-China relations.
Here’s what smart people are saying about China’s role in pacing the AI frontier.
Kenton Thibaut, senior China fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab
A sweeping agreement between Washington and Beijing on slowing frontier AI development remains unlikely, even as both countries increasingly recognize the technology’s risks, Kenton Thibaut, a senior China fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab, said.
China worries AI safety could become another tool for the US to preserve its technological lead, making a major breakthrough on AI safety “highly unlikely,” Thibaut wrote.
Instead, she said the more realistic path is limited cooperation on preventing AI misuse by nonstate actors and building technical systems to monitor risks and respond to emergencies.
“Loss of control may offer a rare basis for cooperation—provided both sides can keep AI safety from becoming another front in their technology contest,” she wrote.
Mizuho analysts
Efforts to slow the development of frontier AI are unlikely to succeed without global coordination, Mizuho analysts led by Vijay Rakesh wrote in a note on Monday.
The firm says unilateral guardrails risk ceding ground to Chinese competitors, which could close the gap with US frontier models while advancing their own computing capabilities.
Mizuho added that achieving effective coordination between cloud providers and governments could be “near impossible.”
Yishan Wong, former Reddit CEO
Yishan Wong, former Reddit CEO, said on X that “pacing the frontier” is the “sane thing” to do.
Core to Wong’s take is that American skepticism toward cooperating with China stems from failing to see Chinese people and their government as “real people, with equally valid and real desires, dreams, and actual human existence.” This is a blind spot that distorts US strategic judgment, he added.
He drew a Cold War parallel, arguing China has historically said it would disarm only once the US matched its (lower) warhead count — so today, the party that’s ahead should move first to slow down, not demand the trailing party stop.
He also disputed that China is close to the frontier, citing its reliance on distilling US models and lack of leading-edge chips.
“There is, overall, strong willingness to work together there — cynically, because working together is how you get rich, and Chinese people just want everyone to get rich; war does not make everyone rich,” Wong wrote.
“But the US should stop being naive and realize that when it comes to AI it has to take the first step in extending the bridge. This announcement and the similar one from OpenAI a couple weeks ago are the right start,” Wong wrote of Amodei’s position.
Chris McGuire, senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations
The latest public exchange over how to regulate frontier AI leaves the US with just two realistic options, Chris McGuire, a senior fellow for China and emerging technologies at the Council on Foreign Relations, argued.
Washington must either strengthen export controls to slow China’s AI development or allow American AI labs to move ahead with fewer domestic safety restrictions to preserve their lead.
“Those are the only two options. There is no longer any middle ground,” McGuire wrote, responding to a Global Times commentary that characterized Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei’s proposal to “pace the frontier” as an effort to preserve US technological dominance over China.
If China remains a “pacing threat,” McGuire argued, the US will struggle to impose meaningful AI safety regulations on its own companies without risking its technological edge.
Arnaud Bertrand, entrepreneur and writer
Arnaud Bertrand, an entrepreneur and author who writes about China and geopolitics, pushed back on McGuire’s take.
He wrote on X in response to McGuire: “China hasn’t ‘clearly and unmistakably rejected collaboration with the US on AI safety’: what they have rejected is Dario’s definition of AI safety, which he defines as the US leading on AI and treating China as a threat to be contained.”
Ryan Fedasiuk, fellow at the American Enterprise Institute
Ryan Fedasiuk, a researcher on China-related national security issues and former State Department advisor, also responded to McGuire on X, writing: “Here is a low-confidence theory: I think we are under-weighting the extent to which Chinese state media’s hostility toward U.S.-China coordination on AI security may be a response specifically to Anthropic’s AI Misuse report.”
He called Anthropic’s report “one of the finest intelligence products” he’s seen, arguing it wasn’t just a disclosure but a major embarrassment for China’s intelligence services by publicly exposing a counterintelligence failure on a global stage.
Fedasiuk said this report will likely shape how Chinese AI labs act going forward, and he expects consequences for the Chinese companies caught routing user queries to Claude without disclosure — a move he suspects Anthropic anticipated as a deterrent against distillation.
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