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The US and China are competing for global leadership in artificial intelligence as the technology rapidly advances. Photo: Shutterstock
The United States should start preparing for scenarios where extreme measures must be taken to stop China from achieving artificial general intelligence (AGI), according to a former White House official, including state-backed espionage and military strikes on Chinese data centres.
Jacob Stokes, deputy director of the Indo-Pacific Security Program at the Centre for a New American Security (CNAS), said at an online event on Thursday that various US agencies, including the Department of Defense and the National Security Agency, should begin assessing what intelligence they need to justify taking such actions.
“Trying to think through the particulars of that will be especially important, in part because it will help policymakers … start to work backwards based on the unique nature of the technology, in the same way that in a past era, policymakers would learn about nuclear weapons and … work backwards from the science to the policy implications,” he said.
In a new CNAS report published last week, the former Obama administration national security staffer called for the US government to consider the feasibility of diplomatic, espionage, cyber and kinetic measures to prevent China from achieving AGI first.
AGI is a hypothetical AI system that can achieve human levels of performance across a wide variety of tasks. The report, titled “Superpowers and AGI”, explores how the imminent arrival of AGI might affect US-China geopolitical competition.
The US currently enjoys a months-long lead over China in frontier AI models, according to Epoch AI. However, China could make a “surprise technological breakthrough” that means it is close to achieving or achieves AGI first, Stokes wrote, citing China’s advances in areas such as robotics and other forms of “embodied AI”.
If this were the case, the US government should consider extreme actions such as military strikes on the data centres that train and run the Chinese AGI system, Stokes wrote, including preventive strikes before China develops AGI.
As AI technology grows in importance economically and militarily, the data centres that form the backbone of the AI industry have emerged as military targets. In March, Iran bombed Amazon data centres in the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain as part of its conflict with the US.
According to Stokes, US government agencies would have to work out what facilities to attack and with which weapons, while considering the risk that the strikes lead to a general war between the two countries.
William Hartung, an arms analyst at the Project on Government Oversight, a Washington non-profit organisation, also warned that any strikes on Chinese data centres would “risk starting a shooting war between two nuclear armed powers that could have tragic consequences for all concerned”.
“Striking Chinese data centres based on how they might or might not be used in the future would be the height of recklessness,” he said.
Another option would be to reverse engineer or “steal” China’s AGI technology, Stokes wrote, which would be justified “legally and normatively” because of China’s own alleged history of stealing US intellectual property.
However, he noted that the US government and intelligence apparatus have “not been organised for espionage to gather technological secrets for decades”.
The stark assessment comes as US President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping are set to have talks in Washington later this month on AI governance as the technology continues to improve, posing growing risks to national and global security.
The “best case scenario” for the talks is that the two sides find the talks “constructive”, Stokes said on Thursday, rather than any expectations of any breakthroughs on key governance issues.
Well, first off Deepseek said they were gunning for AGI. Second, I’ve been keeping up with the hardware they got working in the labs of Peking and Fudan.
From Peking we got this ternary CNT processor: https://www.scmp.com/news/china/science/article/3301229/chinese-scientists-build-worlds-first-ai-chip-made-carbon-and-its-super-fast
And this analog chip: https://www.livescience.com/technology/computing/china-solves-century-old-problem-with-new-analog-chip-that-is-1-000-times-faster-than-high-end-nvidia-gpus
And Fudan’s got this non-volatile storage faster than RAM and with less latency: https://interestingengineering.com/innovation/china-worlds-fastest-flash-memory-device
And a way to store info with one electron instead of 200,000: https://interestingengineering.com/innovation/china-data-storage-single-electron
China is also the ones behind 6G. There’s probably a bunch of other stuff I’m forgetting.
I may be hopeful and a minority but I think the US’s “fears” are well-founded, just as they’re “right” to fear communism itself; as an existential threat that makes their way of things obsolete.
Thank you forbthe further information.
I still agree with your view. AGI is more of a term to hype up investors than an actual technological goal. AI will continue advancing as it ever was, specially after the LLM hype is over. The real fear the US has is if China becomes the lead global exporter of AI products, which include both software (LLMs and, better yet, SLMs) and AI-related hardware. A world of many companies around the world building their own Cloud and AI solutions and datacenters using Huawei chips and Alibaba/DeepSeek models. Losing this market is the US greatest fear.
The question is if LLMs are going to accelerate AGI research, not just by themselves but also by the massive investment into computing power and researchers.
It sounds impossible that it doesn’t, and could accelerate it even by an order of magnitude. Lets HOPE it takes long, or at least 10-20 years because that gives China time to overtake US chip making. If the US is first it makes an abysmal outcome for humanity much more likely.
LLMs are indeed a qualitative leap over other computer data generation architectures because they were able to process more complex tasks with some simple unstructured human input. However LLMs are still far away from an all encompassing AI model. We still have other algorithms in computer vision, optimization and others which other kinds of AI architectures are more capable of delivering results.
Regarding AGI there isn’t even a consensus over what consists intelligence and what would be actionable goals of reaching AGI. AGI has no clear definition or meaning, not even top researchers have a consensus on what does it mean. Currently, like Miguel Nicolelis said in some interviews, AI is neither artificial nor intelligence, it’s an algortithm that repeats patterns found in data (code, text, images, videos) created by us that is fed to these models, which then perform tasks we determine for them. So, in my very humble opinion, I don’t think we are anywhere near of an autonomous quasi-human intelligent agent, but more like a pattern matching program, one which is very expensive, consumes a lot of energy, can’t define tasks on its own, needs a constant stream of data generated by us, and can’t even properly define success in the tasks it does, at best works under our supervision.
Note that not being an AGI does not mean it’s not useful or powerful. It is a revolutionary piece of tech. The crux of the conflict between China and US is not about who will reach AGI first, but who will dominate the computing market in the next 30 years. The US was the main center of computing in the last 70 years and it’s one of the main areas the US has a lead over all other countries. But China is making leaps in its own computing industry, including chip making and cutting edge software, which will simply end US dominance over this area. And this will simply mean the end of the US hegemony.
So China does represent an existential threat to the US, not because of AGI, but because it’s the big challenger in the US industry. Note that all financial architecture of the US depends on the US leading the world economy. Who the hell would want US bonds if China is the go to shop for most of the industrial needs of the world? Who the hell would care about the US stock market if all the best cutting edge companies in the world are within the Chinese borders?
This is also why if China achieves technological dominance over the US, the only thing left for maintaining their current financial architecture is to rely on war might to maintain US hegemony, and force other countries to maintain bonds and stocks of US assets. But what if we start to have Irans and Yemens popping out all around the world, what this hegemony on the military industrial complex would even mean?
Yeah literally every Chinese AI lab has AGI as a stated goal, it’s of course a vague and essentially meaningless concept but still… you can’t say a subjective term is unachievable, the only barrier to AGI’s existence is having a convincing enough argument as to why your tech deserves that label.
Based off what I read, it means an AI that can solve any cognitive problem humans could and possibly more. Including how to make a better AI which may be the kicker.