Why China Will Rule AI

He is also the co-founder of and a senior adviser to the Berggruen Institute. In his 2013 book, “The End of Power,” Moisés Naim famously wrote that “power no longer buys as much as it did in the past. In the twenty-first century, power is easier to get, harder to use—and easier to lose.” That may be true for deconstructed authority in the West, but it is not true in China where the weighty center of authority remains in the un-deconstructed Communist Party.

There, power is hard for others to get, easily used and nearly impossible ever to lose. This systemic incapacity of open societies puts them at a disadvantage when it comes to ruling frontier AI models. Endless appeals about the dangers of unleashed AI from rosters of the most eminent scientists, Papal encyclicals and monarchical meditations gain no effective traction.

The public is warily confused and feels helpless to affect the set course of events. By and large, legislators appear hopelessly clueless and slow on the draw as AI development exponentially accelerates. The dire warnings and calls for regulation by the top CEOs of Big Tech are suspect as a ruse to create a cartel of the most powerful to keep competitors at bay.

The “leader of the free world” simply dismisses any and all worries as nothing more than a “hoax” that will prevent America from becoming great again. Everyone throws in their two cents or two trillion and then throws up their hands in virtual resignation. At the end of the day, there is no core institution or vested authority that can impose control over AIs demonstrably capable of escaping their programmed confines.

Unable to reach consensus out of the cacophony of voices and welter of conflicting interests, the best we can hope for — if that — is a pause in the pace toward the precipice by the AI companies themselves. The Chinese government, by contrast, is taking the reins firmly in hand with few qualms. In China, “human alignment” of AIs equals ideological alignment with the Party, which will resolutely thwart any threat to its enduring dominance by superintelligent machines.

Even as official propaganda accuses Western warnings about loss of control of AIs as “fear-mongering,” China’s Minister of State Security, Chen Yixin, last week made crystal clear where the lines would be drawn. In an article published in Chinese media, he listed the key threats to “political” and “ideological security,” cybersecurity, espionage and “military struggle.” It is worth reading the list to get a sense of how those in charge in China see the AI challenge: “First, AI has a systemic impact on the political and security environment. As of June 2026, the number of users of artificial intelligence products in China exceeded 500 million, with daily word meta-calls exceeding 140 trillion, and the application of artificial intelligence has been rapidly and comprehensively deployed.