AI Summary
5 min readThe ‘But China!’ Dilemma Driving the A.I. Race
In the United States, the dominant metaphor for the U.S.-China AI relationship is a race—a sprint toward superintelligence in which the winner gets global dominance and the loser faces existential peril. This framing paralyzes American regulation: every attempt to slow down or impose safety requirements crashes into the same objection—"But China!" If we pause, the argument goes, China will race ahead and build dangerous AI under an authoritarian regime. But Matt Sheehan, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace who has spent years studying China's AI ecosystem and participating in U.S.-China dialogues, argues this picture is badly incomplete. China does not see itself in a race the way America does. Its government has imposed the world's strictest AI regulations while its companies have simultaneously caught up. And the mutual mistrust between the two superpowers is creating a dangerous gap between the accelerating capabilities of frontier models and the slow-moving, suspicious diplomacy meant to govern them.
Why China Doesn't Buy the Race Model
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What you'll learn
- 1 Timestamped Outline
- 2 (03:38) **The Race Metaphor vs. China's Reality** - Sheehan explains that China does not share America's "superintelligence race" framing and instead pursues a diffuse, application-focused AI strategy
- 3 (06:47) **The "But China" Problem Defined** - Klein and Sheehan examine how the US-China competition paralyzes American AI regulation efforts
- 4 (08:48) **China's Regulatory Focus: Content Control, Not Frontier Safety** - Sheehan details what Chinese regulations actually target versus what they miss
- 5 (10:41) **Distillation: The Speedboat Problem** - The practice of training models on other models' outputs means the US lead may be dragging China along
- 6 (13:24) **How China Sees America: Hegemon and Hypocrite** - Sheehan explains China's perception of US AI policy and its implications for cooperation
- 7 (18:15) **The Trust Deficit and Dario Amodei's Warning** - Klein highlights how statements from lab leaders poison the atmosphere for potential cooperation
+ Full timestamped outline available in the app
Show Notes
America is waking up to the critical risks posed by artificial intelligence. But every conversation about possible regulation tends to hit the same wall: “Well, what about China?”
Chinese A.I. models are just slightly behind American ones. If America slows down its A.I. development to make our models safer, the fear is that China will simply race ahead of us and own this critical technology of the future — with A.I. models that are less safe than our own.
So how should the United States respond to this prisoner’s dilemma? And is it possible that the two countries leading the A.I. race could actually strike a deal?
Matt Sheehan is a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. He’s been closely following the A.I. debate in China, and how China’s been interpreting the A.I. debate here. And he’s working to try to lay a foundation for future coordination between the two countries. He’s the author of a newsletter under his name and the 2019 book “The Transpacific Experiment: How China and California Collaborate and Compete for Our Future.”
This conversation was recorded on Sept. 10.
Mentioned:
“The Adolescence of Technology” by Dario Amodei
Book Recommendations:
“Country Driving” by Peter Hessler
“From the Soil” by Fei Xiaotong
“On Beauty” by Zadie Smith
Thoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at [email protected].
You can find the transcript and more episodes of “The Ezra Klein Show” at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast. Book recommendations from all our guests are listed at https://www.nytimes.com/article/ezra-klein-show-book-recs.html
This episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” was produced by Rollin Hu. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris, with Julie Beer. Our senior engineer is Jeff Geld, with additional mixing by Isaac Jones, Aman Sahota and Gautam Srikishan. Our recording engineer is Aman Sahota. Cinematography by Marina King and Kyle Kelley. Video editing by Steph Khoury, Brandon Belk-Yee and Julian Hackney. Our executive producer is Claire Gordon. The show’s production team also includes Marie Cascione, Annie Galvin, Kristin Lin, Emma Kehlbeck, Jack McCordick and Jan Kobal. Original music by Pat McCusker. Audience strategy by Shannon Busta. The director of New York Times Opinion
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