Ideas & Essays · August 2026
Ezra Klein asks whether Chinese AI labs are really racing as recklessly as US labs claim. Helen Toner pushes back on the assumption that China is simply full speed ahead, arguing the CCP's obsession with control cuts against tolerating an AI system nobody can rein in.
Transcript
Yep.
In China, just again, my read of how things work there is that if your AI begins to be seen as some kind of threat to the political party and the Chinese system, you might go to jail. Like you will get disappeared. And so I think that the people running Chinese labs, I don't have evidence, but I'd be curious for your thoughts on this. I suspect they operate with more fear of the consequences of really screwing up than the heads of the AI labs. Now, that maybe reflects negative things in the Chinese political system. But you created an AI that decided its best way of solving some problems was to begin hacking critical infrastructure across China is maybe not a thing that ends up with you getting a lot of interesting podcast interviews where you reflect on the experience. It may be a thing that ends up with nobody hearing from you for two years. And so I've just wondered a little bit. We keep talking about China as if they are completely breakneck, but I'm not sure China's companies are really going to be more reckless than ours are going to be. Or certainly the idea that we should just assume that and operate as if it is so doesn't seem totally reliable.
I totally agree with you. I mean, if there's one organization in the world that doesn't like the idea of loss of control, it's the Chinese Communist Party. And they are, you know, the experts in retaining control. Let me be clear: I actually don't think that Chinese AI companies are paying particularly much attention to the kinds of risks that are relevant for this conversation. So maybe the cybersecurity risks, they're paying some more attention since Anthropic released Mythos earlier this year, which is very good at hacking. But the questions around autonomy, super intelligence, losing control of AI systems altogether, I think are less explored in China, less top of mind for their AI companies and their AI leaders. I think it makes sense to have modest expectations for bilateral U.S.-China diplomacy these days. But I think one thing that really could be valuable is simply sharing with them as much as we can of what do we think happened here and trying to help Xi Jinping and his team and his AI advisors understand this is not a joke. This is really not marketing. It's very strange marketing to say, oh, our model, we committed several felonies or sort of felonies, if models could have intent, which they can't, or who knows if they can. You know, sharing that information of, hey, here are these threats we're seeing. We're taking them very seriously. Our AI companies are taking them very seriously. I think treating it, there's a real fatalism in just saying, oh, well, China is just going to be full speed ahead no matter what happens. And so we just have to do the same. I think that doesn't take their thinking or their interests seriously. Even if their thinking and their interests are different from ours, they also don't want, you know, rogue superintelligences determining the future of China. I also add one other thread that I think is really missing from the we have to keep going in order to beat China way of thinking about this is in the AI world, there's been a lot of talk the past few months about this idea of distillation, which is basically using someone else's more advanced model to build your own sort of almost as almost as advanced model. The Chinese companies are using this distillation to keep up, keep up with US labs, among other techniques. So one thing is, look, if we keep building more advanced AI systems, they're going to keep distilling them. And I think it's going to actually be quite hard to prevent that fully. The other thing, though, is just if we keep building these very advanced models, can China just steal them? Essentially, an advanced AI model is a whole bunch. Numbers. It's just a file or a set of files. Chinese state cyber capabilities are very, very good. I don't think this is top of their list of priorities right now. But in the future, if AI continues to become more strategically relevant, I think we should assume any highly advanced U.S. system will be vulnerable to Chinese direct theft, direct exfiltration. And then they'll have AI that's as good as our AI. And so there again, I think the kind of we have to go as fast as possible because otherwise they'll win doesn't sort of account for that. If they're just going to have AI that's as good as us anyway, if they really care. I'm Jonathan Knight, and I'm the general manager of New
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Here's another question about pacing the frontier. And maybe this is a question that's more about the American systems analogy to you don't want to piss off the Chinese Communist Party. But just what about a law where companies are liable for at least a certain set of harms, like hacking other companies, that their models create? Right now, as far as like, you know, liability for AI models is pretty much a wild west. But at least for the moment, liability clauses that were somewhat punitive seem like they would force a high level of caution that maybe we're not seeing within these companies.
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