Reactions from ranked influencers
4 posts
The Xi Jinping speech on AI was striking in that it championed both openness and AI safety. However China is not as open to non-Chinese companies as the rest of the world is open to Chinese companies. Changing that is foundational for real credibility on 'openness'.
Also incentivises US companies to develop and release more open models, which is good! (For those of us who don't think this is somehow like diffusing access to nuclear weapons at any rate)
As a non-American this is honestly one of the more compelling arguments I've seen for the US maintaining an AI lead over China (so that China continues to champion openness out of geopolitical self-interest and thereby promotes global AI diffusion and access).
@deanwball's excellent analysis of Kimi and the Chinese approach to AI provides the perfect background for understanding Xi’s four observations at yesterday’s WAIC. The speech may sound like standard diplomatic boilerplate at first glance, but it is actually a revealing statement of China’s preferred global AI order. Xi’s first point was openness. The reason is obvious: China is still behind the United States at the frontier of AI, and openness is the only plausible way for China to catch up. That is why Xi described AI as a “rare historic opportunity”. “Rare” and “historic” compared with what? Compared with earlier moments when China was excluded from strategic technologies, such as nuclear technology, which both the United States and the Soviet Union denied to China until China eventually developed its own capabilities through a combination of indigenous effort and technology “borrowed” from others. So when China calls for openness today, it is not making a timeless philosophical commitment. It is making a strategic demand from the position of a latecomer. China wants access to global models, talent, chips, research, open-source ecosystems, and technical knowledge because that is what it needs at this stage. But no one should assume that China would remain an advocate of openness once it becomes the leader. Once China controls the commanding heights, it is entirely capable of imposing restrictions of its own, just as it has already done in areas such as export controls over EV tech and rare earth. The same logic explains Xi’s second point: that countries should “jointly oppose overstretching the national security concept in the field of AI and placing one country’s security over that of others”. In plain English, this is aimed at the United States. China is objecting to Washington’s use of national security grounds to restrict China’s access to advanced chips, models, cloud services, and other AI-related technologies. China wants to stop the United States from closing the channels through which Chinese firms and labs can learn from, benchmark against, or distil from frontier Western models. The irony, of course, is that China itself has been one of the world’s most enthusiastic practitioners of national securitisation. Under Xi, almost everything can become a national security issue: data, finance, education, ideology, food, energy, culture, technology, platforms, supply chains, and even entertainment. Yet when the United States applies the same logic to AI, Beijing suddenly discovers the dangers of “overstretching” national security. The principle is not really anti-securitisation. The principle is: China should be free to securitise what it wants, while others should not securitise in ways that slow China down. Xi’s third point, on inclusiveness and mutual learning among civilizations, continues the same logic. China warns against domination by one model, meaning the US model, and invokes civilizational diversity to carve out space for its own governance approach. This is not new. China has long used the language of diversity, pluralism, and civilizational difference to resist Western universalism and to legitimise its own political model. But there is an obvious limit to this diversity. It apparently stops at the border of each country. Diversity among civilizations is praised; diversity within China is not. Inside China, the only permissible civilizational narrative is that of the “community for the Chinese nation” (中华民族共同体), which, unsurprisingly, must be led by the CCP. The regime invokes civilizational pluralism internationally while enforcing ideological uniformity domestically. And truth be told, the PRC is in many ways the least traditionally Chinese of all Chinese dynasties, since its ruling ideology is ultimately derived not from Confucius, Laozi, or any other classical Chinese political thought, but from a German and a Russian. Xi’s fourth point, on bridging the AI and digital divides, serves two purposes. First, the emphasis on avoiding new historical injustices in AI is designed to rally the Global South. The message is that AI should not become another domain in which rich Western countries monopolise technology and leave developing countries behind. This is a powerful argument rhetorically, and China will use it to pressure the United States and its allies to share AI technologies more broadly. China has a special interest in this because it is the only major power where most leading Western AI models are unavailable or heavily restricted. Second, the same argument allows China to market its own AI models, infrastructure, standards, and governance tools to developing countries in the name of capacity-building. “Bridging the AI divide” sounds benevolent, but it also means expanding China’s technological ecosystem abroad. If countries in the Global South become dependent on Chinese models, Chinese cloud infrastructure, Chinese data systems, Chinese surveillance tools, and Chinese content-control norms, then the result will not simply be technology transfer. It will be the export of a Chinese-built AI governance environment, including the censorship and surveillance architecture that comes with it. Taken together, Xi’s speech is not useless political rhetoric. It is a surprisingly frank account of the global AI order China wants. China wants openness while it is catching up; limits on US national-security controls while it still needs access to frontier technology; civilizational pluralism internationally while maintaining ideological uniformity at home; and AI capacity-building for the Global South in ways that expand China’s technological and governance influence. The question for the rest of the world is therefore simple: do you want this vision to come true?