AI Judge changed title after evaluation, original title: "Anthropic paper projects US lead in frontier AI through 2028"
Anthropic published a paper titled “2028: Two scenarios for global AI leadership” that analyzes AI competition between the United States and China. The document states that the US and its democratic allies currently lead in frontier AI capabilities, with compute access as the decisive factor. It notes that recent US export controls have slowed Chinese progress, though Chinese labs have narrowed the gap through talent recruitment and distillation attacks. The paper contrasts two possible 2028 outcomes depending on whether export controls tighten or the US fails to act.
bilalWe've published a paper that explains our views on AI competition between the US and China.
The US and democratic allies hold the lead in frontier AI today. Read more on what it’ll take to keep that lead: https://www.anthropic.com/research/2028-ai-leadership
Positive users endorse Anthropic's paper on US AI leadership over China for its strategic insights, while negative users reject it as deceptive bullshit and accuse the company of misconduct.
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LITERALLY WHAT I HAVE BEEN SCREAMING ABOUT LATELY
"If the CCP integrates near-frontier AI systems quicker and more effectively into China’s economy and the CCP security apparatus, and drives global adoption of subsidized, low-cost AI, then it could secure advantages over democracies that overcome an intelligence deficit."
We've published a paper that explains our views on AI competition between the US and China.
The US and democratic allies hold the lead in frontier AI today. Read more on what it’ll take to keep that lead: https://www.anthropic.com/research/2028-ai-leadership
the funniest thing in this article is
you shaped it as democracy vs CCP or USA vs CHINA
but in reality its open source vs YOU
if you really cared about democracy you would have open sourced your models too
but you don't care about democracy you are just trying to use nationalism to your advantage
We've published a paper that explains our views on AI competition between the US and China.
The US and democratic allies hold the lead in frontier AI today. Read more on what it’ll take to keep that lead: https://www.anthropic.com/research/2028-ai-leadership
The most revealing thing about this AI leadership paper is that it reads less like a vision for innovation and more like a glossy whitepaper for a 21st century East India Company.
Every generation of incumbents discovers a new moral vocabulary for why they alone should control transformative technology.
In the 90s it was cryptography. We were told strong encryption was too dangerous to spread because terrorists, rogue states, chaos, dual-use, etc. So the US crippled exports, weakened products, slowed adoption, and kneecapped parts of its own software industry. Right up until reality steamrolled the policy and we woke up to its stupidity and then eCommerce, secure communications, software signing, and the modern internet exploded and gave us tremendous benefits.
Now the exact same priesthood has returned with AI.
- “Dual-use.” - “Strategic advantage.” - “Model distillation.” - “National security.”
- “Responsible access.” A few different nouns but mostly the same ones. Same instinct:
Centralize control, gatekeep compute, fuse state and corporate power, and call it safety.
The funniest part is that this strategy is almost perfectly designed to accelerate the thing they claim to fear.
You do not stop a rival superpower (who happens to be the absolute best at scaling energy and manufacturing and who has a choke-hold on rare Earths refinement) from building domestic capability by permanently attempting to strangle them.
You create the economic and political incentive for total self-sufficiency.
We have already done that as Jensen warned. We went from 100% market to nearly 0%. Huawei is now manufacturing millions of chips. DeepSeek v4 trained on them. They have more energy than the rest of the world combined. Meanwhile, we have activists and anti-economic fools like AOC and Bernie pushing for data center moratoriums and we can't build a single bullet train in 20 years and folks fighting to not expand the energy grid here and new nuclear plants getting tied up in environmental regulation for a decade.
The sanctions did the exact opposite of what the hawks wanted. They jumpstarted a moribund, dinosaur of a Chinese chips industry. We basically said to the people who happen control the most powerful manufacturing engine on the planet "we intend to squeeze you."
They rightly saw it as an existential threat.
The sanctions become the industrial policy.
Huawei. SMIC. Domestic lithography. Packaging. Memory. Entire Chinese supply chains that did not exist at serious scale a decade ago now exist precisely because Washington convinced Beijing they had no choice.
Brilliant work.
So the endgame here is what exactly?
1) Push China into a Manhattan Project for chips and AI. 2) Increase the strategic value of Taiwan even further.
3) Once China reaches self sufficiency that can invade Taiwan and choke off our own super advanced chips where are made there exclusively (and no we don't have even close to enough TSMC factories in Arizona or anywhere else in the world).
That's every NVIDIA chip. Every Google tensor chip. Every Apple chip. Every chip in you iPhone and Android phone. Every Amazon chip. The chips in your car and truck and hair dryer and washing machine.
4) Escalate a cold tech war into a permanent civilizational bloc conflict that is likely to turn into a shooting war at one point.
5) Fragment the global software ecosystem.
6) Create American AI aristocracies protected by regulation and compute licensing.
And somehow call this “open innovation.”
Meanwhile the actual history of software keeps screaming the opposite lesson:
Knowledge diffuses, open ecosystems win, developers route around gatekeepers, and attempts to permanently contain computation usually fail.
What really jumps off the page is the assumption that a tiny cluster of frontier labs should become quasi-sovereign actors, deciding who gets intelligence, who gets compute, who gets models, and which countries are permitted to participate in the future.
Not elected governments.
Not open markets.
Not open-source communities.
A handful of corporations sitting beside the national security state, insisting that concentration of power is necessary to protect democracy.
You almost have to admire the audacity.
We've published a paper that explains our views on AI competition between the US and China.
The US and democratic allies hold the lead in frontier AI today. Read more on what it’ll take to keep that lead: https://www.anthropic.com/research/2028-ai-leadership
Anthropic drops a paper on the US-China AI race
They believe the US and its allies may be able to lock in a 12-24 month frontier AI lead by 2028 if they close China’s access to advanced compute and copied model outputs.
The report says China is not far behind because Chinese labs are allegedly using loopholes, smuggled chips, offshore data centers, and distillation attacks to stay close to US frontier labs.
Anthropic frames compute as the central bottleneck of AI power, saying advanced chips are not just one input but the gatekeeper for training, deployment, revenue, experimentation, and future model improvement.
The report says Huawei may produce only 4% of NVIDIA’s aggregate compute in 2026 and 2% in 2027, which is one of the paper’s sharpest claims about China’s semiconductor gap.
Anthropic argues that distillation is systematic industrial espionage, because Chinese labs can use American model outputs to copy capabilities without paying the full training cost.
The report claims a Chinese AI lead could enable automated repression, stronger cyber operations, faster military AI deployment, and broader authoritarian influence through cheap global AI infrastructure.
Future frontier models may become a “country of geniuses in a data center,” meaning a single model cluster could act like a huge expert workforce for cyber, science, engineering, and military research.
We've published a paper that explains our views on AI competition between the US and China.
The US and democratic allies hold the lead in frontier AI today. Read more on what it’ll take to keep that lead: https://www.anthropic.com/research/2028-ai-leadership
Not only is Anthropic saying they will have a "country of geniuses in a datacenter" by 2028, but also that the US could be ahead by 12-24 months.
Before GPT-5.5 and Claude Mythos chinese labs were ~8 months behind in broader capabilities and ~5 months behind in coding.
However, catching up to GPT-5.5 and especially Mythos will likely take longer than that, because they have no way of training and serving 10T models at scale. Especially not in the monthly cadence as american frontier labs are doing.
Most of the gains are no longer coming from a single generational leap through larger pre-training but through monthly RL post-training improvements. The leap between Mythos Preview today and a future Mythos version in 6-12 months will be enormous compared to the leap between Opus to Mythos.
The relative leap between Opus 4 and Opus 4.7 will also be overshadowed by the leap between Mythos Preview today and a future Mythos version, as RL benefits from model scale (+all the other reasons like growing compute, and accelerated R&D pace)
I am going to make some commentary on this blog post, so bear with me. Starting with 1)
We've published a paper that explains our views on AI competition between the US and China.
The US and democratic allies hold the lead in frontier AI today. Read more on what it’ll take to keep that lead: https://www.anthropic.com/research/2028-ai-leadership
Anthropic: Chinese AI is a threat.
They've correctly identified the risks, including cheap Chinese AI capturing American businesses even when it's less capable.
But they completely blundered the solution: zero mention of an American open source strategy. In fact, they actively campaign AGAINST open source. 🤦♂️
Full breakdown of their paper from today:
We've published a paper that explains our views on AI competition between the US and China.
The US and democratic allies hold the lead in frontier AI today. Read more on what it’ll take to keep that lead: https://www.anthropic.com/research/2028-ai-leadership
company that steals IP urges US government not to allow others to steal their IP
Anthropic drops a paper on the US-China AI race
They believe the US and its allies may be able to lock in a 12-24 month frontier AI lead by 2028 if they close China’s access to advanced compute and copied model outputs.
The report says China is not far behind because Chinese labs are allegedly using loopholes, smuggled chips, offshore data centers, and distillation attacks to stay close to US frontier labs.
Anthropic frames compute as the central bottleneck of AI power, saying advanced chips are not just one input but the gatekeeper for training, deployment, revenue, experimentation, and future model improvement.
The report says Huawei may produce only 4% of NVIDIA’s aggregate compute in 2026 and 2% in 2027, which is one of the paper’s sharpest claims about China’s semiconductor gap.
Anthropic argues that distillation is systematic industrial espionage, because Chinese labs can use American model outputs to copy capabilities without paying the full training cost.
The report claims a Chinese AI lead could enable automated repression, stronger cyber operations, faster military AI deployment, and broader authoritarian influence through cheap global AI infrastructure.
Future frontier models may become a “country of geniuses in a data center,” meaning a single model cluster could act like a huge expert workforce for cyber, science, engineering, and military research.
This is like writing a paper during the Cold War arguing for US nuclear dominance without mentioning the need for an arms control agreement or similar. Anthropic has a lot of thoughtful policy staff and honestly I think you guys can do better
We've published a paper that explains our views on AI competition between the US and China.
The US and democratic allies hold the lead in frontier AI today. Read more on what it’ll take to keep that lead: https://www.anthropic.com/research/2028-ai-leadership
I honestly don't understand the mindset of Chinese people working at Anthropic.
If a company so publicly declares your home country as an adversary and is so overtly anti-China, wouldn't you, feel disgusted working there? Dario is able to attack so brazenly because he knows the Chinese employees in the company won't get offended. He knows they will just endure it silently like beasts of burden.
@AnthropicAI China sucks, but you all supported mass censorship and wouldn't even let people say China made Covid in a lab. Everyone at Anthropic supported vaccine mandates and vaccine passports. None of you care about freedom. You want to lock us all down again.
Oh damn! Anthropic talking about US vs China in the AI race. Something I’ve been thinking about quite a bit lately.
We've published a paper that explains our views on AI competition between the US and China.
The US and democratic allies hold the lead in frontier AI today. Read more on what it’ll take to keep that lead: https://www.anthropic.com/research/2028-ai-leadership
This is absolute BS and an attempted regulatory capture by Anthropic. The knowledge behind CBRN attacks is already online, where do you think the models learned it from??
“Compounding the problem, labs in China often release dual-use capable models as open-weight. Once a model is open-weight, safeguards that do exist can be removed, making the model available to any state or non-state actor to use for malicious purposes, including the cyber and CBRN misuse those safeguards were built to prevent.”
Anthropic: Chinese AI is a threat.
They've correctly identified the risks, including cheap Chinese AI capturing American businesses even when it's less capable.
But they completely blundered the solution: zero mention of an American open source strategy. In fact, they actively campaign AGAINST open source. 🤦♂️
Full breakdown of their paper from today:
@AnthropicAI tl;dr: please dont let anyone else compete with us
I wonder why Anthropic thinks 2028 is the year we need to solidify our lead against China🤔
Anthropic: Chinese AI is a threat.
They've correctly identified the risks, including cheap Chinese AI capturing American businesses even when it's less capable.
But they completely blundered the solution: zero mention of an American open source strategy. In fact, they actively campaign AGAINST open source. 🤦♂️
Full breakdown of their paper from today:
Someone needs to write an anarchist response to this "which government do we trust to control AI" bs.
We've published a paper that explains our views on AI competition between the US and China.
The US and democratic allies hold the lead in frontier AI today. Read more on what it’ll take to keep that lead: https://www.anthropic.com/research/2028-ai-leadership
Please tilt the playing field in our favor, while sabotaging long-term U.S. national security, harming other players in the AI ecosystem, and potentially sparking a major economic or kinetic war that costs us access to rare earths, so we can dominate the two years after our IPO and get super rich!
We've published a paper that explains our views on AI competition between the US and China.
The US and democratic allies hold the lead in frontier AI today. Read more on what it’ll take to keep that lead: https://www.anthropic.com/research/2028-ai-leadership
remember when I was banned from LessWrong for asking too many questions about China competing at the frontier of AI?
maybe they will unban me now that Anthropic is asking the same questions…
🤣
We've published a paper that explains our views on AI competition between the US and China.
The US and democratic allies hold the lead in frontier AI today. Read more on what it’ll take to keep that lead: https://www.anthropic.com/research/2028-ai-leadership
…it's pretty damning that everyone took Mythos either at face value or as a psyop to inflate Anthropic's positioning vs OpenAI, but it's so transparently a political play. All the export control hawks were ecstatic about it.
We've published a paper that explains our views on AI competition between the US and China.
The US and democratic allies hold the lead in frontier AI today. Read more on what it’ll take to keep that lead: https://www.anthropic.com/research/2028-ai-leadership
