{"id":920648,"date":"2026-07-18T01:14:45","date_gmt":"2026-07-18T06:14:45","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/2026\/07\/18\/i-met-with-chinas-top-ai-experts-theyre-freaking-out-too\/"},"modified":"2026-07-18T01:14:45","modified_gmt":"2026-07-18T06:14:45","slug":"i-met-with-chinas-top-ai-experts-theyre-freaking-out-too","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/2026\/07\/18\/i-met-with-chinas-top-ai-experts-theyre-freaking-out-too\/","title":{"rendered":"I Met With China\u2019s Top AI Experts. They\u2019re Freaking Out, Too"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Just over a<\/span> week ago, I attended a major artificial intelligence<\/a> conference in Zhongguancun, Beijing\u2019s bustling high-tech district.<\/p>\n

It was packed with fascinating sessions touching on everything from recursive self-improvement\u2014the idea that models can tweak their own code and advance indefinitely\u2014to humanoid robots. And it featured a few legends of computing, including Whitfield Diffie, co-inventor of public-key cryptography, and Andrew Barto, who won the Turing Award with Rich Sutton for his pioneering work on reinforcement learning.<\/p>\n

But I left with one takeaway above all else: The US and China should put their fierce AI rivalry to the side.<\/p>\n

Frontier AI\u2019s cybersecurity and systemic risks are too serious to ignore, and increasingly capable agentic models could soon cause chaos unless the world\u2019s AI superpowers can work together. \u201cAI is a global technology with global benefits, global harms, and a consistent tendency for new capabilities to eventually proliferate,\u201d Stephen Casper<\/a>, a computer scientist at MIT who spoke at the conference via video, told me afterward.<\/p>\n

Until now, the US has largely viewed China\u2019s AI advances as an economic and national security threat. Washington has imposed tight restrictions on chips and chipmaking equipment to stymie the country\u2019s development of powerful AI. Most recently, the US government ordered<\/a> Anthropic to prevent foreign nationals from accessing its most powerful models, Mythos and Fable 5, over national security concerns<\/a>. In response, Anthropic revoked access for everyone. One company that was of particular concern, WIRED previously revealed, was a South Korean telecom giant with alleged ties to China<\/a>.<\/p>\n

But the conference, organized by the Beijing Academy of Artificial Intelligence, reinforced the idea that both the US and China stand to lose if AI is developed too quickly and recklessly. As AI becomes more powerful, more agentic, and more intertwined with everyday life, the risks that it could be used to conduct cyberattacks or fail in catastrophic ways will only grow. Because the world\u2019s two dominant AI powers are responsible for the most advanced models, cooperation between them feels like it will be crucial.<\/p>\n

Casper pointed to research<\/a> showing that the benefits of international collaboration on AI dangers outweigh any national security risks that come from working together. He likened the current situation to how the US and the Soviet Union were forced to work together on nuclear dangers, even as they sought to out-stockpile one another.<\/p>\n

\u201cOne thing that almost everyone in AI can agree on right now is that AI doesn’t need a Chernobyl moment,\u201d Casper said.<\/p>\n

One day-long session highlighted the universality of the cyber challenges raised by more advanced AI. This includes new kinds of vulnerabilities in AI-generated code<\/a>, novel ways of attacking systems enabled by agentic tool use, and automated methods for carrying out social engineering<\/a> attacks.<\/p>\n

After another session, I spoke with Lin Yun, a professor at Shanghai Jiao Tong University who does excellent work<\/a> on AI and computer security. Yun told me he expects hackers to gain an advantage over the near term, but that new countermeasures, including novel uses of AI, should tip the balance back toward defense over time.<\/p>\n

Yun said that even if international cooperation is complicated by competition, it should remain a priority. \u201cIf different countries understand the risks in similar ways, it becomes easier to develop shared safety principles and technical standards,\u201d he told me. \u201cThe key is to find areas where sharing can reduce systemic risk without exposing sensitive operational details.\u201d<\/p>\n

Perhaps the most pressing question for both nations is how to balance openness with risk. Open-weight models have become crucial for research and innovation, with Chinese models proving popular in the US. But as these models advance, it will become more challenging to ensure they don\u2019t help hackers identify security vulnerabilities and can\u2019t be wielded as cyber weapons.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Will Knight
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Just over a week ago, I attended a major artificial intelligence conference in Zhongguancun, Beijing\u2019s bustling high-tech district. It was packed with fascinating sessions touching on everything from recursive self-improvement\u2014the idea that models can tweak their own code and advance indefinitely\u2014to humanoid robots. And it featured a few legends of computing, including Whitfield Diffie, co-inventor<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":920649,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[22042,4371],"tags":[5454,5836],"class_list":["post-920648","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-chinas","category-experts","tag-chinas","tag-experts"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/920648","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=920648"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/920648\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/920649"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=920648"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=920648"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=920648"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}