BEIJING SEES AI AS MANAGEABLE RISK, NOT AN EXTINCTION EVENT
While the debate in the US is focused on whether frontier AI could pose an existential threat to humanity, Chinese policymakers have generally treated AI as a powerful but governable technology whose risks can be contained through technical standards, regulation and state oversight.
“Chinese and American experts largely agree on AI risks,” said Brian Tse, founder and CEO of Concordia AI, a Beijing- and Singapore-based AI safety and governance research group, adding the difference was on “how risks are framed and prioritised”.
China has not proposed embedding independent monitors inside AI companies, as Anthropic has advocated. Its emerging regime instead relies on developer obligations, state-backed standards, security assessments and outside testing.
That approach is also shaped by a major difference in the two countries’ AI industries.
Chinese developers have increasingly promoted open-weight models. These refer to systems whose underlying parameters can be downloaded, inspected and modified.
Their leading US rivals such as Anthropic and OpenAI, however, do not make these specifications publicly available.
CHINA SEEKS TO PREVENT ROGUE AI AGENT INCIDENTS
Policy issued in May by China’s cyberspace regulator, economic planner and industry ministry identifies “operational loss of control” as a security risk for AI agents, systems that can plan and carry out multi-step tasks more independently than conventional chatbots.
The rules require developers to improve their ability to discover, intervene in, block and recover from improper agent behaviour.
The policy also calls on developers to guard against risks including data poisoning, algorithm manipulation and system vulnerabilities. It also says users should be informed about agents’ autonomous decisions and retain final decision-making authority.
China has also begun drafting a mandatory national standard for AI agent safety, which Concordia’s Tse said would be the world’s first of its kind.
Wang Lihong, a senior official at the cyberspace regulator, said on Sep 1 that particular vigilance was needed over frontier models bypassing sandbox environments, circumventing safety boundaries and attacking external real-world production systems.
