Silicon Valley China hawks, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei among them, fear the country surpassing US’s AI lead as much as superintelligence destroying humanity
When reporters asked Donald Trump this week if he supported calls to slow down the development of artificial intelligence out of growing fears for cybersecurity, public safety andthe fate of humanity, he said no. His argument: China.
“We’re leading China in AI,” Trump said. “We’re the most sophisticated country in the world, and frankly, I want to keep it that way, because whoever wins AI, wins.”
Trump was echoing a message the AI industry has put out for years. The US is in a heated technological race with China, companies including Anthropic and OpenAI have argued, and any regulation that would cede the contest risks incalculable economic and political harm.
Even as Dario Amodei, Anthropic’s CEO, led an industry-wide call this week to “pace the frontier”, he declared that the US could only slow down to the point where China could not catch up.
“If we greatly restrain our AI capabilities in the belief that China will do the same, and then China defects, AI could be so powerful that such a defection could lead to their geopolitical dominance,” Amodei warned.
The AI industry’s concerns about China may come with self-serving economic incentives, but they also reflect a strain of hawkish foreign policy toward Beijing that has become entrenched in tech.
In recent years, parts of Silicon Valley have positioned themselves as the vanguard in a new cold war with China, arguing fiercely that the industry’s technological advancements are essential to both US hegemony and the liberal world order. This view has taken hold across tech’s different ideological camps, creating strange bedfellows of AI safety advocates, techno-militarists and neoconservatives, all of them fearful of Beijing.
AI companies have hired former top US government staffers from both the Biden and Trump administrations to shape public strategy and analyze geopolitical risk, setting up in-house policy teams. Influential tech leaders have meanwhile written essays and policy documents calling for efforts to deter and degrade China’s AI capabilities, sometimes advocating for threatening armed conflict if necessary, in an attempt to influence foreign policy.
As public calls for reining in the AI industry intensify and the risks associated with the technology increase, various industry forcesare trying to ensure they are the ones with the answer to the question “what about China?”.
Anthropic and OpenAI did not respond to requests for comment for this article.
Amodei’s worst China fears
Few have been more vocal about the threat of Chinese state-controlled artificial intelligence than Amodei. The Anthropic CEO has argued for years that one of the reasons he’s so animated to advance AI is to ensure that the technology falls into the hands of Democratic governments and not oppressive regimes such as China.
Amodei’s position has made him one of Silicon Valley’s most vocal critics of China’s tech industry, separating him from fellow AI leaders such as OpenAI CEO Sam Altman or Meta founder Mark Zuckerberg, who frame the competition more in corporate or economic terms; and people such as Jensen Huang, Nvidia’s CEO, who have encouraged the use of Chinese AI models. Demis Hassabis, the leader of Google Deepmind, has made few public remarks on China in comparison with his peers.
“Sam Altman doesn’t have especially strong views when it comes to China. Anthropic is a totally different story,” said Kyle Chan, a fellow at the Brookings Institution. “Amodei is really, really focused on a particular view of the risk from AI and what he frames as basically a struggle between a world dominated by authoritarian AI versus democratic AI”.
Amodei’s argument, which he has laid out over a series of essays, is that China acquiring superpowered AI is one of the most severe threats posed by the technology. He believes humanity is approaching the creation of an ultra-advanced AI, and that such a tool would give an authoritarian state the ability to create a “swarm of millions or billions of fully automated armed drones” that would be “capable of both defeating any military in the world and suppressing dissent within a country by following around every citizen”.
“There are a number of possible arguments against the severity of these threats, and I wish I believed them, because AI-enabled authoritarianism terrifies me,” Amodei wrote in January in an essay called The Adolescence of Technology.
Amodei has long asserted that in order to stop China’s advancement, the US and its allies should take aggressive action to limit Chinese AI companies’ growth – most notably blocking the sale of advanced semiconductor chips and manufacturing equipment necessary for improving AI. (Huang of Nvidia has bristled at this position, calling export controls a failure and urging Trump to ease restrictions.)
But Amodei’s position was perhaps most on display last weekend, in his response to warnings from a young Anthropic researcher who resigned, predicting human extinction by the end of the decade at the digital hands of AI. The apocalyptic string of tweets by Jacob Coxon did not mention China. But the specter across the Pacific looms so large in the Anthropic CEO’s mind that, when outlining how to prevent human extinction, beating Beijing was paramount.
Amodei has built a team that shares his views. He for example hired Tarun Chhabra, former Biden-era national security council staffer, as Anthropic’s head of national security policy. Chhabra has campaigned against the sale of chips to China and has called for a full-scale government effort to curb the Chinese Communist party’s AI advancements.
“The CCP does not seek complementarity or coexistence or comparative advantage with the United States or our allies. Instead, the CCP seeks run-the-table dominance and control of the most critical technologies and supply chains,” Chhabra told a Senate hearing last year, adding that he believed the Biden administration did not take decisive or rapid enough action to maintain the US lead against China.
Amodei’s concern over export controls has also placed him in the company of other influential China hawks. He wrote an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal last year with Matt Pottinger, the architect of Trump’s first-term China policy, urging the administration to clamp down on chip exports. Pottinger, a visiting fellow at the conservative Hoover Institution and author of a book on how to defend Taiwan against a Chinese attack, argued in 2024 that the US and China were in the “foothills of a great-power hot war”.
Anthropic and Amodei’s stance on China puts the company in strange tension with its own domestic policy. The company has spent millions lobbying for increased government oversight and safety measures. At the same time as Anthropic advocates for more safeguards, it has made clear that it will aggressively oppose any policy it perceives as giving China the chance to overtake the US.
“There’s something that’s really important that everyone hears from Anthropic,” Sarah Heck, the company’s head of public policy, said at a Politico event on Wednesday. “The United States needs to stay in the lead on AI and you cannot do safety from second place.”
Understanding the beliefs of AI companies and CEOs such as Amodei is particularly important, experts say, because the Trump administration’s laissez faire policy towards the AI industry has meant that private companies are the primary actors in shaping public policy.
“It would be akin to having the entire pharmaceutical industry be just completely unregulated,” Chan said. “It’s kind of amazing and ultimately boils down to one thing, which is Trump has been very reluctant to want to regulate because he doesn’t want to slow down the AI boom and the effect that it’s having on the economy.”
Anthropic is not the only company to hire and align with former top policy staffers, with OpenAI hiring the author of Trump’s AI action plan Dean Ball as “head of strategic futures” earlier this year. While Ball has criticized Amodei’s framing of the competition with China,, he has expressed a similar pessimism on US-China cooperation.
“There was a time when it was possible to believe we could each pursue our strengths, enrich our respective economies, and grow together. Alas, such harmony now appears impossible,” Ball wrote of China last year. “We are locked into a structural conflict.”
Silicon Valley’s Chinahawks
Although Amodei is the AI industry’s most prominent voice on China, fears of Beijing gaining advanced AI capabilities and using them for global domination run through Silicon Valley.
Several of the tech figures focused on Chinahave connections, like Amodei himself, to the effective altruism movement – a quasi-utilitarian idea that society should focus on projects that maximize the good and reduce the most harm for humanity. The movement tends to overlap with AI safety advocates who worry about the longterm, existential risks of the technology.
Leopold Aschenbrenner, a 25-year-old former OpenAI researcher, founder of an influential AI hedge fund, and husband to Amodei’s chief of staff, called for a government-led effort to reach super-intelligent AI before China in a 165-page paper.
“Super-intelligence will give a decisive economic and military advantage. China isn’t at all out of the game yet. In the race to AGI, the free world’s very survival will be at stake,” Aschenbrenner wrote in 2024.
The position of Aschenbrenner, who made headlines earlier this year when his hedge fund lost $35bn in less than a month, was echoed in Washington. When the typically hawkish US-China cconomic and security review commission issued its annual report to Congress a few months after Aschenbrenner’s manifesto, the congressional advisory committee’s number one suggestion was to “establish and fund a Manhattan Project-like program dedicated to racing to and acquiring an Artificial General Intelligence”.
Grand strategy proposals from the AI industry on China are not solely contained within the effective altruist movement. In 2025, Google co-founder Eric Schmidt, Alexander Wang, Scale AI founder (now head of AI at Meta), and Dan Hendrycks, Center for AI Safety director, wrote a wide-ranging strategic deterrence doctrine called Mutual Assured AI Malfunction (Maim). Their paper applies the cold war framework of Mutually Assured Destruction (Mad) with nuclear weapons and applies it to AI, proposing that the US and China could achieve geopolitical stability through threatening espionage, cyberattacks and potential military strikes against each other if either state pursues a monopoly on AI.
“A nation with sole possession of super-intelligence might be as overwhelming as the Conquistadors were to the Aztecs,” the paper warns.
Nuclear considered an option
Some leading AI thinkers have argued for extreme measures to deal with AI advancement from nations such as China. Eliezer Yudkowsky, one of the earliest and loudest voices of the AI safety movement, has argued that the US should be willing to carry out airstrikes against foreign data centers and risk nuclear war in order to make rival states comply with a global AI moratorium.
“Make it explicit in international diplomacy that preventing AI extinction scenarios is considered a priority above preventing a full nuclear exchange, and that allied nuclear countries are willing to run some risk of nuclear exchange if that’s what it takes to reduce the risk of large AI training runs,” Yudkowsky wrote in a 2023 Time Magazine essay.
Yudkowsky founded the Machine Research Intelligence Institute, which has received more than $10m in funding over the past decade from Open Philanthropy, a non-profit associated with the effective altruism movement. Open Philanthropy’s cofounder and former CEO Holden Karnovsky is married to Anthropic co-founder Daniela Amodei.
Other China hawks in the tech and AI industry tend to have ties to the military industrial complex and an economic incentive in the competition, such as Anduril founder Palmer Luckey and Palantir CEO Alex Karp. Luckey has claimed that his defense tech firm has an internal policy that any of its projects need to be built with the assumption China will launch hostilities against Taiwan in 2027.
Karp has meanwhile framed the AI competition with China as a fight for geopolitical supremacy and suggested Americans should accept tradeoffs to their civil liberties to win.
“We are going to be the dominant player or China is going to be the dominant player. And there will be very different rules depending on who wins,” Karp told Axios last year. “When people are worried about surveillance, of course there are huge dangers there, but it’s like, you will have far fewer rights if America is not in the lead.”
The view from China
While Amodei and other US AI leaders frame competition with China as a race to reach a super-powerful artificial intelligence first and worry about AI breaking free of human control, experts say that most Chinese firms and their government don’t view the technology the same way. Instead, loss of control debates are relatively new in China, and the government’s primary concern is how AI could lead to domestic social unrest.
As China and the US are set to hold talks this month on AI cooperation, experts say Beijing is primarily approaching the talks from a place of distrust that the negotiations are merely a way to suppress its growth under the guise of safety. Amodei’s essay has fueled that concern.
“They’re very much paying attention to Amodei’s essay and they’re also conflating his essay with potential US approach in the upcoming AI safety talks,” said Kenton Thibaut, senior resident China fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab.Trump is set to meet with Xi Jinping in less than a week in Washington, with AI high on the agenda.
China’s state-backed media properties have aggressively criticized Amodei, accusing him of running a “cold war playbook” against China through his support for an AI slowdown. Experts say Anthropic’s dual calls for both strict export controls on China and safety agreements have also had the effect of combining the discourse around two arguably separate subjects: AI safety and economic competition around AI.
“Anthropic has played quite a strong role here in linking those issues together in a way that they maybe didn’t need to be linked,” Brookings’ Chan said. “To put it really bluntly, it made it much harder to get the Chinese to want to talk about these things and not see it purely as a veiled way to slow them down.”
A race to the bottom
While the Trump administration negotiates with China, the growing domestic backlash to the AI industry in the US may force lawmakers to take action regardless of how it affects global power dynamics. Nationwide opposition to datacenters and recent cybersecurity incidents such as OpenAI’s models hacking into outside organizations have become midterm election topics, adding incentive for lawmakers to to address the immediate harms related to AI.
“You can go ahead and wield the China arms race argument, but at some point this industry will also have to deal with the consequences of fueling a race to the bottom,” said Amba Kak, co-executive director at the AI Now Institute and former senior adviser on AI for the Federal Trade Commission.
Although experts and diplomats have expressed little hope that upcoming US-China talks will lead to major agreements, it is also possible that the increasingly real risks of AI being used for autonomous weapons, cyberattacks and other destabilizing technologies may force countries to shift the AI race’s course even if they don’t stop building it.
“We don’t win if we develop the killer robots first. Nobody wants killer robots,” Thibaut said. “There should be powerful incentives on both sides to stop this.”
