IT’S MY THURSDAY ESSAY FOR VIP SUBSCRIBERS: They Want to Save Us From AI. Who Saves Us From Them?

America’s most important edge is one that the CCP can’t afford to let China replicate: our free-wheeling, laissez-faire tech culture. From the start of his extended term as Communist Party boss, Xi began reversing China’s decades-old free-market reforms. Under Xi, there’s less of Deng Xiaoping’s “it is glorious to grow rich” mantra and more Party control over pretty much everything.

But that does put China in a bind. AI creates new domestic and international threats to the CCP, but staying behind the US increases the foreign threat, while further advances risk increasing the domestic threat.

That’s one reason, as Eric S. Raymond recently put it, China “officially stated that they consider the calls for an AI pause to be a ‘power play’ and will not be participating in any US-led agreements to slow down development.” The Beijing Times reported on Tuesday that China’s state-owned Global Times accused Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei of proposing a “quiet AI Cold War” to “widen America’s lead” through tech barriers and regulatory schemes.

Any worldwide pause would freeze China’s disadvantages into place.

Whatever the domestic threat might be to CCP control, Beijing can’t afford to slow — that is to tame — Chinese AI development. Getting the Americans to tame themselves, however… in Xi’s eyes, that would be ideal.

But who in the US would ever encourage us to do such a thing?

Enter, stage left: Barack Hussein Obama.

Lots to chew on in this one.