Ahead of next week's Summit meeting between Presidents Trump and Xi where this may come up:
From Geopolitical Monitor, May 6:
In November 2025, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang told the Financial Times that “China is going to win the AI race.” But what does it mean to “win” such a race? Huang’s comments made headlines, but many outlets focused solely on the potential for Chinese artificial intelligence (AI) models to match or surpass the capabilities of their US counterparts without considering the implications of widespread adoption of China’s version of the frontier technology. The AI race is not only about how powerful any single model is, but also how countries seek to integrate it into daily life. The Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) vision for AI is comprehensive and concerning, aimed at creating a version of the technology that ideologically aligns with the Party and further tightens its grip on power. Meanwhile, the proliferation of Chinese AI tools beyond China’s borders poses a multifaceted threat, encompassing data security concerns, censorship, criminal misuse, and military applications.
How the Chinese Communist Party Views AI
The CCP is conscious of the risks posed by AI.
In September 2025, China released its AI Safety Governance Framework 2.0, which warned of several catastrophic risks of AI systems, including the potential “loss of control over knowledge and capabilities of nuclear, biological, chemical, and missile weapons” and that “extremist groups and terrorists may be able to acquire relevant knowledge” through AI systems. In April 2025, Chinese President Xi Jinping warned a Politburo study session on AI that the technology poses “unprecedented risk and challenges” and called for China to “speed up the formulation and improvement of the relevant laws and regulations, policy system, application specifications, and ethical criteria, construct systems for technology monitoring, early warning for risks, and emergency response, and ensure the safety, reliability, and controllability of AI.”
At the same time, Xi has called AI “the next epoch-making technological transformation” and CCP leadership has pushed a “whole nation” strategy to catch up to the United States in technology. China’s 15th Five-Year Plan, published in March, envisions AI as both a driver of China’s economic growth and a key pillar of its national security apparatus, with expansion of the country’s AI + initiative, focused on widespread adoption and integration of AI across all areas of society guided by “Xi Jinping Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era,” being a key goal.
“Safe, Reliable, and Controllable” AI
Accordingly, the CCP has attempted to strike a balance between innovation and regulation, introducing stringent AI safety measures while still ensuring that firms like Alibaba, Baidu, DeepSeek, and Zhipu can keep pace with their Western rivals. To Western onlookers pining for their governments to do more to reign in the nascent technology, some of these regulations may seem appealing. The Cyberspace Administration of China has introduced or proposed rules to prevent the creation of deepfakes, require AI-generated content to be labeled, and regulate AI services that simulate human behavior. While some of these measures may be beneficial for Chinese citizens, their primary purpose is to ensure continued political control for the Party. As a recent report from the Australian Strategic Policy Institute notes, regulations are in place to ensure that AI is “safe, reliable, and controllable,” meaning that AI companies are supposed to promote “core socialist values,” and prevent the proliferation of content that “harm[s] the national image,” or “incite[s] subversion of state power.”
For instance, China’s Provisions on the Administration of Deep Synthesis Internet Information Services specifies that providers should “adhere to the correct political direction, public opinion orientation, and values trends” and that deepfake services should not be used for purposes that “endanger the national security and interests, harm the image of the nation, harm the societal public interest, disturb economic or social order, or harm the lawful rights and interests of others.” It is no coincidence that the “lawful rights” of individuals are listed after the concerns of the state, as fundamentally, China’s AI regulations serve the state and Party over the people. Moderation guidelines for large language models (LLMs) ostensibly designed to regulate “unsafe” content that promotes terrorism, for example, are equally if not more concentrated on content that is deemed harmful to the Party and state, including sensitive topics like the Tiananmen Square massacre, producing AI tools that reinforce CCP propaganda and control over society. Beyond censorship, the CCP’s state security apparatus has enthusiastically adopted AI, using it to power an extensive surveillance system to more closely monitor China’s 1.4 billion people....
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