China's AI push is rooted in a deep fear of falling behind, shaped by memories of poverty and foreign exploitation. Xi's open-source stance at the Shanghai summit reflects a genuine effort to share AI gains globally. The U.S., meanwhile, is racing toward AGI with reckless spending while its own public grows angrier about the technology by the day.
Xi's lofty Shanghai summit speech about open-source AI and global cooperation masks a far darker reality: China's AI rise is built on industrial-scale theft, chip smuggling and iron-fisted CCP control. Beijing blocks foreign acquisitions of Chinese AI firms and jails founders who try to leave, proving the "open" rhetoric is pure performance. Trusting Xi's vision of AI as a global public good ignores what Beijing actually does.
There is a 4% chance the U.S. and China will reach a formal agreement to limit frontier AI training or deployment before 2029, according to the Metaculus prediction community.
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