Opinion | China’s A.I. Play Is Different From America’s

Early in the Cold War, even as the United States and the Soviet Union engaged in a relentless nuclear arms race, they treated nuclear technology as a tool of soft power and diplomacy — something to share and export, a seal on alliances and a token of friendship.

Thus Dwight Eisenhower’s America launched the Atoms for Peace program, which helped build civilian nuclear programs around the world, in the same year that it executed the Rosenbergs for giving the Soviets our atomic secrets. The Soviet Union likewise exported forms of nuclear power to Eastern Bloc nations and Mao’s China. In each case, the broad goal was to spread the tech while maintaining control over the weapons, taking very different approaches to the two forms of nuclear strength.

This history suggests a framework for understanding the difference between the American and Chinese approaches to artificial intelligence. The United States is behaving as though frontier A.I. models could be the equivalent of nuclear weapons, offering an immensely destructive form of power that requires a careful and jealous watch. American A.I. tycoons constantly talk as if they were engaged in an Oppenheimer-style race (complete with Oppenheimer-style moral hand-wringing), the American military-industrial complex is intent on keeping China from closing the current A.I. gap, and both industry and government increasingly treat frontier models as grave security threats.

Meanwhile, China treats the models that its companies produce as the equivalent of nuclear energy, a lower-risk technology to be shared and commercialized to win friends and influence the world and undermine the advantages of the American A.I. giants. There is some Chinese lip service to risk and safety, but little sense that this is a unique power to be hoarded, a geopolitical trump card or a weapon with existential stakes.

For a while (well, for a few months, but that’s an eternity in A.I. time), I’ve wondered about the sincerity of the Chinese position. Since its companies and models have consistently lagged behind Anthropic and OpenAI, China has obvious incentives to use open source to undermine Silicon Valley’s profits and reach, all while letting Washington worry about the risks that the most cutting-edge models may create. Were China to suddenly surpass us, I’ve speculated, the incentives might change, and it might start trying to lock down and weaponize its best models, treat them as state secrets and sovereign goods.

We do not yet have a Chinese model that surpasses our own, but this week brought a model that may come close, Kimi K3 from the Chinese company Moonshot AI. And so far Beijing is treating Kimi K3 like all its prior models: It’s going to be open source for maximum adoption, without any American-style fretting over risks and guardrails and export controls.

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