Apparently, leading AI tech developers, mainstream media, and Senator Bernie Sanders aren’t the only ones fearmongering about the rapidly expanding artificial intelligence industry.
But President Donald Trump doesn’t follow the crowd. He dismissed those fears as bogus.
“The AI Hoax being perpetrated by the Radical Left Dumocrats is reminiscent of their Global Warming Scam of not so long ago, where everyone was going to die from extreme heat. What happened? MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!!!,” he recently posted on Truth Social, while noting that the U.S. is leading China in developing this tech, adding, “frankly, I want to keep it that way because whoever wins AI wins.”
Interestingly, Chen Yixin, China’s Minister of State Security, has also been ringing the alarm bells over the threat posed by AI.
So maybe AI really is a doomsday weapon that humanity is foolishly assembling to our own peril.
Not so fast.
According to Chen, his big fear of AI is not the possibility of the creation of some superintelligence in the vein of Skynet from “The Terminator” or HAL 9000 from “2001: A Space Odyssey,” which threaten the very existence of humankind; rather, his concern is that AI tech could empower hostile foreign actors to undermine Chinese Communist Party rule.
“Various hostile forces and people with ulterior motives are abusing generative artificial intelligence technologies such as deepfake audio and video, AI-generated text and images, and intelligent bot armies to fabricate political rumors in low-cost, mass-produced fashion, spread harmful information and incite antagonistic emotions, carrying out public-opinion warfare and cognitive warfare against us and directly threatening our political security, system security and ideological security,” Chen argues.
Chen especially noted American AI firms Anthropic and OpenAI as posing significant cyber threats to Chinese networks and infrastructure, stating, “Some countries and organizations now have the ability to rapidly discover vulnerabilities in batches, automatically chain together attack paths and complete complex hacking tasks. This substantially lowers the technical threshold and cost of conducting cyberattacks and creates serious risks and hidden dangers for our country’s critical information infrastructure.”
In other words, Chen sees AI foreign development as threatening the Chinese authoritarian government’s control over its own population.
Thus, Chen’s fear of AI is not the same concern expressed in the U.S.
Indeed, Chen’s concerns validate Trump’s dismissal of the “AI Hoax.” The last thing China wants is the U.S. winning this AI race because China knows whoever wins will control the global economic system.
Anti-AI fearmongering in the U.S. has more in common with a Hollywood dystopian science fiction plot than with reality on the ground. It sounds scary, but the reality of China winning the AI race would actually be much more of a disaster to our liberty and way of life than some nefarious artificial superintelligence.
In fact, if leading AI developers like Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei are really convinced that some super AI could lead to the mass extinction of humanity within a decade, why isn’t he ordering his company to slow down development? If what his company is building is that dangerous, why not act preemptively instead of waiting for a government regulatory agency to be created?
Could the real reason behind the call for government regulation of the industry be more about industry control and stifling potential future competition than about any doomsday super AI?
China’s concerns about foreign AI, in other words, American AI, suggest that all the fearmongering has much more to do with who gets to control the industry than anything else.
