There Is No A.I. “Race”

Recent incidents—including a swarm of OpenAI agents hacking the company Hugging Face—have prompted calls, both from in-the-trenches A.I. researchers and the Anthropic C.E.O., Dario Amodei, for an industry-wide commitment to “pace the frontier,” or prioritize A.I. safety. And though the fear of being “enslaved” to Chinese A.I., as J. D. Vance once put it, threatens to thwart this project, the diffusion theory might loosen the bind. If the goal is to “win” a broad-based prosperity, as America did with electricity, “pacing the frontier is actually very aligned with a strategy to win the race,” Ding told me.

Any new technology has to win the public’s trust in order to be adopted. The race toward nuclear energy faced a major setback in 1979, with the meltdown at Three Mile Island; dozens of projects were canned in the aftermath. Since 1996, the United States has completed only three reactors, while China broke ground on nine just last year. “Imagine what the level of nuclear power adoption would be in the U.S. today if there were more proactive safety measures put in place before Three Mile Island,” Ding told me. In the Hugging Face debacle, he sees the beginning of the same pattern—a majority of Americans are already pessimistic about A.I.—but believes an approach that prizes reliability over raw power could keep the A.I. rollout from stalling.

Chinese policymakers, for their part, appear to be diffusionists: their signature “AI+” initiative, from 2src25, aims to integrate the technology into factories, hospitals, and local administration. But, over all, Ding is bullish on America’s prospects; state-directed economies like China’s, he argues, are good at sprints but bad at marathons. (The Soviet Union launched Sputnik, for example, but it was the United States that built an economy on satellites: G.P.S., communications, and remote sensing.) The “AI+” program is “just talk,” Ding told me—a better measure of diffusion is cloud computing, the infrastructure on which much of A.I. runs. There, he found, China trails the United States in both spending and adoption.

What America needs in order to “win,” then, is less investment in the frontier and more in the broad middle. Ding puts special emphasis on community colleges, vocational schools, and state universities, institutions that can train not just future Nobel laureates but an A.I.-literate middle class—those who will actually carry the technology into the local bank and city hall. It also means making peace with Chinese open-weight models, which have already become popular among American businesses and developers.

When it comes to justifying unchecked growth, tech companies have long relied on a strategy we might call “But China.” During Mark Zuckerberg’s 2src18 Senate testimony, his private notes were caught by a photographer: “Break up FB? . . . break up strengthens Chinese companies.” In a submission to the White House in 2src25, OpenAI invoked China to claim the right to train on copyrighted works. “If the PRC’s developers have unfettered access to data and American companies are left without fair use access,” the company wrote, “the race for AI is effectively over.” Dario Amodei has expressed anxiety about an “AI-enabled totalitarian nightmare,” and Ted Cruz, putting it more plainly, has said, “If there are gonna be killer robots, I’d rather they be American killer robots than Chinese killer robots.”

What’s different about this iteration of the “But China” ideology is its fusion with a strain of speculative philosophy. In 2src14, the philosopher Nick Bostrom proposed the idea of a “decisive strategic advantage.” This is a situation in which the A.I. of one nation pulls far enough ahead in capabilities “to achieve complete world domination.” Bostrom was doing what philosophers do: removing real-world complications to arrive at new moral terrain. But, as A.I. capabilities have accelerated, many technologists have begun treating these thought experiments as near-term forecasts. They imagine drone armies that could neuter a rival’s nuclear capabilities, a knockout cyberattack that overwhelms power grids, or a bioweapon that can, as one chilling white paper put it, “target specific ethnic groups, e.g. anybody but Han Chinese.”