In defending data centers—and now the technology itself—President Donald Trump and his administration have painted China as an adversary eager to exploit any self-imposed handicaps by the U.S., while blaming the nation for choreographing the current domestic backlash against the AI buildout. This week, Trump criticized wary developers as “conspiracy theorists” peddling a “sick hoax,” and argued that any guardrails on the tech would only serve Beijing’s interests. This came after executives like Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman warned of potentially apocalyptic consequences if the tech’s advancements outpace its own developers, and called for a slowdown in the frenetic frontier-model push.
Quoted by the BBC, the country’s foreign ministry spokesperson said this week that "narratives of threat, confrontation, and malicious competition serve only to disrupt the process of global AI governance and are not in anyone's interest.” But to the U.S., the matter is existential, and the battle extends well beyond Silicon Valley or the borders of either nation. More broadly, however, policymakers in both countries have viewed establishing a "lead" in this race as success in integrating AI across society and industry while reaping the rewards of doing so. The second aspect, he told Newsweek, would be “deploying AI rapidly” and harnessing its economic benefits.
Winning the AI race would therefore involve establishing a commanding and unbridgeable lead when it comes to employing the technology—effectively using homegrown models for scientific, economic and military purposes. Lin, a former State Department and Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) analyst, told Newsweek this would comprise helping a labor force become more productive, promoting new scientific discoveries, improving public services, and establishing industries which were “previously constrained by technological bottlenecks.” “Developing frontier models matters," he said, "but so does diffusing AI safely and effectively throughout the economy.” “There is no day after tomorrow if China wins at this,” Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said at an event in D.C. last week. A white paper from AI researcher and investor Leopold Aschenbrenner, published to much discussion in 2024, warned that the country could use the tech to manufacture “advanced bioweapons…that could target specific ethnic groups, e.g. anybody but Han Chinese.” Others, however, see the consequences as less extreme, and the Manichean, winner-takes-all framing of the AI race as mistaken.
Charoenwong, a professor of finance at the INSEAD business school campus in Singapore, told Newsweek that China is already ahead along this metric, and will continue using the technology “to drive productivity gains that show up dramatically in GDP growth, more so t
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