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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.
So to everyone doubting I gotta ask: China is communist, right? Realization of communism would require a powerful AI, I think. With this many people, automation would have to be very highly advanced. It’s in China’s interest. I genuinely think they’re out to build artificial superintelligence. It’s one of those things where if it’s possible it’s inevitable because the march of tech hasn’t stopped and China’s the furthest one on said march.
Government creates vague and baseless excuses to vilify its most significant rival. More at 11!
So they need AGI to defeat China but also need to defeat China so that China does not come up with AGI first. So the only thing inevitable is not defeating China. Got it. 🤣
(I’ve just rolled with it that AGI is even possible with current Western LLM development.)
General intelligence could’ve been pretty cheap in the US. Just build free hospitals, schools and give intelligent agents proper jobs and upbringing. /s
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.
When can it replace deputy directors of CNAS?
We gotta be close because I am seeing a lot of stupid ideas that’s sound AI generated. Who needs Skynet when you have clowns like this?
Honestly, I see this article less as a call for war due to an absurdly stupid reason, and more as a way to continue propping up the AI bubble. We all know that AGI is a complete bullshit prospect, especially at this point in time for our political economy.
However, to me, this reads more like:
“See AGI, is actually achievable and real possibility, and we’re in a deep competition against China over it.”
When, in reality, China is carefully structuring the development of AI towards where it’s useful, and steadily developing. They aren’t trying to achieve some Hail Mary, they’re just logically applying a new technology where it is able to aid production.
By stating that AGI is in fact real, and that it’s an exstistentional battle that would require the US to take drastic action, the article continues to prop up the ludicrous gamble that is the AI Bubble.
In my opinion at least, that’s what the primary objective of this article is.
I’d love to hear other comrades thoughts on that analysis though.
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.
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.
Reads like a Dr. Strangelove character. Salivating for an excuse to (attempt to) bomb China. Wrapping it in rhetoric about AGI is a shoddy cover for several reasons. Such as the fact that AGI is largely a marketing buzzword rather than a concrete achievable goal, that AI advancements from China’s end are more likely to be open sourced or talked about openly in papers than be super duper secret (so why would you need to set up elaborate operations to “steal” it), or that striking some data centers after they’ve achieved a breakthrough is not going to reverse the knowledge they gained.
On top of that, China is a productive powerhouse and is used to doing more with less, so they would more readily adapt and keep doing research anyway. As far as I can tell, this boils down to US war hawks being in denial about the material truths of China and because the only language these war hawks know is violence, thinking if they bomb China, this will somehow reverse the trend. The only thing that bombing China will do is hasten the demise of the western ruling elite by rupturing what little stability the empire still has to work with.
if ol Maverick were still around, what witty tune would he sing towards the goal of bombing China?
Delusional, the US doesn’t stand a chance against China
They’re losing so badly against Iran. What makes them think they have any hope of winning against China?
Pure imperial delusion
imagine if WW3 started because the US bombed a Chinese data center.
They’ll set the whole world ablaze than let the free peoples of the world have just one sliver of it.
this should come as no surprise to anyone
AGI of course really meaning “not being able to stabilize our investment bubble in overhyped technology”
China isn’t even aiming for AGI iirc.
Deepseek said it was.
Yeah Chinese AI companies are doing the same things US ones are by and large, the difference is that the regulatory environment prevents them from running roughshod over the social fabric and the state control over the finance sector means that China hasn’t seen a trillion dollar AI bubble emerge.
which is actually contributing to their need to be more innovative and efficient while also reaping the benefits of siphoning the advances from the US based idiot dumping trillions into training their autocorrect tools.
Okay so I looked into it more and yes Chinese AI companies are attempting to achieve AGI but it is not a structural priority (or necessity) like it is in the United States.
Actually for China it’s far more of a structural priority than for the US because AI development is all over China’s latest 5 year plan
I was wondering if they’d think to do this. Crazy idiots.
There’s no way the empire is talking about this now.
achieving artificial general intelligence first
Acting as if this is the space race or the rush to discover the steam engine. No motherfuckers, the future doesn’t insist on Asmiovs three laws of robotics or sex androids.
AGI could replace literally every single job.
By what definition of AGI? For anything to replace every job, it would need to have at least equivalent capability to humans and by that point, we’re basically talking about recreating humans but in a lab instead of through pregnancy. There are lot of roles where number of humans needed can be reduced with automation, which has been a process ongoing for a long time. But replacing every (or even most) jobs is a HUGE bar to pass. Not only in capability, but in production and maintenance, and somehow creating automation that can fulfill human-like roles without also wanting to revolt / being deserving of rights because they are too similar to humans (if they are actually sapient, then you haven’t really replaced “aware that they are aware” beings with automation).
This thread had me immediately thinking of:
Organoids The Matrix *Brave New World * Mike, the headless chicken
How we define life as brain wave activity, and how Mike clearly shows that’s wrong.
And ethicality of organoid use, since we don’t know and can’t prove sentience or none, pain or none, and other things.
