A globally recognizable tech executive, high-spirited from preparing for a public offering, offers imprudent remarks criticizing the government. The state strikes back harder than anyone expects. Overnight, the bargain between a skyrocketing sector of the economy and the government is shattered.
If you think this story could be about Anthropic, you’re only half right. In 2020, the Alibaba co-founder Jack Ma found himself in the doghouse after he publicly rebuked Chinese regulators. Citing regulatory concerns, the authorities canceled the public offering of Ant Group, another company Mr. Ma helped found, and subsequently unleashed a regulatory storm that left few Chinese tech companies untouched.
The U.S. government is skating close to its own Jack Ma moment, when a government wounds a tech leader seemingly out of spite. Self-destructive American actions, not Chinese competition, may be the most significant threat to the evolution of A.I. for years to come, long after the government and Anthropic resolve their current dispute.
On June 9, Anthropic released its model Fable 5, an adapted version of its powerful Mythos model, which has incredible capacity to find vulnerabilities in software. Anthropic’s chief executive, Dario Amodei, even said that companies that used Mythos had called it a “superweapon.” Three days later, the U.S. government issued an export control directive blocking use of Fable 5 by foreigners and noncitizens — including some of Anthropic’s own employees — which prompted Anthropic to disable all access to the model. A tangle of explanations behind this directive have been reported, including the risk of “jailbreak” (when a model bypasses built-in safety guardrails) and the risk of access by foreign adversaries. On Friday, the government permitted Anthropic to restore some users’ access to a version of Mythos, though negotiations are still underway about Fable 5.
Over the past decade, the U.S. government has used export controls to deal sometimes crippling blows to Chinese technology champions. The action against Anthropic upended this logic by turning this policy instrument against American companies, purportedly to exert the U.S. government’s grip over increasingly slippery A.I. models. The challenges of regulating A.I. at the frontier have now reportedly moved the government to ask Anthropic’s chief competitor, OpenAI, to limit the users for its own next model.
We often think of A.I. as a race between the United States and China. Instead we are seeing the emergence of an even more acute form of competition, between the public power of governments and the private power of ambitious companies. Both countries are struggling to determine whether their frontier A.I. companies are national champions or national security threats. A.I. labs in both countries are also starting to realize how much their operations depend on the state’s sufferance. The U.S. government needs to strike a better balance between ambition and control, lest it irrevocably damage its relationship with these companies and America’s long-term technological edge.
The second Trump administration has careened from extreme to extreme on A.I. policy. It came into office de-emphasizing some A.I. safety concerns, downplaying harms to workers and preaching the virtues of a hands-off approach. Its stance shifted in March: The Pentagon designated Anthropic a supply chain risk after the company protested the use of its A.I. models in autonomous weapons and domestic mass surveillance. Reports about Mythos’s capabilities the following month appear to have shocked the administration into taking safety more seriously. The confrontation around Fable 5 has been the latest turn in a dance between a company that proclaims a desire for safeguards and an administration that wants unfettered control over these models.
The Chinese government, meanwhile, has been overseeing its A.I. labs for considerably longer. It requires security assessments and tests models for their ability to anticipate Beijing’s sundry political sensitivities. The state has blocked Chinese companies from purchasing advanced Nvidia chips in an effort to favor the domestic chip industry, even after the Trump administration cleared these chips for sale to China. It has reportedly restricted overseas travel by certain A.I. researchers and told two of the founders of Manus, a popular A.I. agent that acts as a digital assistant, not to leave China while the government reviewed their company’s acquisition by Meta. The authorities soon after ordered the unwinding of the deal.
Unlike in the United States, in China no one questions who will ultimately win the struggle between state and corporate power. But the effects of the regulatory storm Beijing unleashed in 2020 remain evident. Alibaba’s stock has lost around two-thirds of its value since Mr. Ma’s speech and Ant Group has still not been able to go public. Venture capital funding in China collapsed and is only now rebounding. These days, nearly any conversation with Chinese A.I. labs includes bitter complaints about government overreach.
The United States, with its system of legal protections and its deep capital markets pouring money into A.I., is not likely to suffer to the same degree. The companies and government officials are likely to reach an understanding. But Washington and American A.I. labs need to treat each other with greater sincerity and seriousness going forward.
First, the heads of A.I. labs need to stop their doom trolling. It makes little sense to make panicked claims about the destructive potential of A.I. without a plan to work with the government to address those risks. The current administration makes such cooperation particularly difficult because of its demonstrated willingness to punish companies to assert dominance or satisfy a political constituency. But the labs still must take more care to address A.I.’s transformative impacts.
Second, the U.S. government needs to realize that the stakes of A.I. are far too high to allow a breakdown of trust. Despite a recent executive order that established a voluntary review program of highly advanced models, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has seemingly delighted in celebrating Anthropic’s troubles with the government. The administration has imposed major restrictions on Anthropic without offering sufficient explanation. Even if the government is nettled by the attitude of A.I. chiefs, it is irresponsible to treat them with contempt. American allies are wondering if they can rely on American A.I. models, and talented foreign researchers in American labs are reconsidering their career plans — neither of which serves American interests.
Third, America’s government and its A.I. labs need to update their understanding of Chinese A.I. Beijing’s pronouncements on A.I. are distinctly less apocalyptic than Anthropic’s; Chinese firms are less able to invest in data centers (for lack of American chips) and more interested in applying A.I. to physical technologies. By most appearances, China is pursuing a substantially different vision of the A.I. future. Frictions within China may present an opportunity for the United States to put further distance between Chinese entrepreneurs and the overbearing Chinese state — but that would require the administration to drop policies that seem hostile toward foreign talent, including Chinese citizens.
The A.I. chaos of recent weeks is self-defeating. For the United States to win the A.I. future, it needs to do better at avoiding the missteps of Beijing.
Dan Wang is a research fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution and the author of “Breakneck: China’s Quest to Engineer the Future.” Julian Gewirtz, a senior research scholar at Columbia University, served as senior director for China and Taiwan Affairs at the National Security Council and deputy China coordinator at the State Department.
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