Ep 90 - China isn’t ignoring AI risk, it’s rejecting America’s version of it

About this episode

When Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei called on US labs to pace the AI frontier, Washington said no – and so did Beijing. • In fact, Chinese state media outlet China Daily went further, calling Amodei’s suggestion a “self-serving bid for profit.” The back-and-forth has led to an ongoing debate around whether China takes AI safety seriously. • Kendra Schaefer’s take: China does take AI risk seriously – but what it won’t accept is the premise that its own progress is the problem. On this episode of the Trivium China Podcast, host Andrew Polk sits down with Kendra (Trivium’s Head of Tech Policy Research) to unpack: • Why China’s response to the “pacing the frontier” debate looks dismissive on the surface, and why that reading misses how much AI regulation Beijing is already planning • How pursuing open-weight models has become a geopolitical position for China, with roughly 70% of derivative models on Hugging Face now built on Chinese base models • China’s new argument in the distillation fight: that banning it is an unfair trading practice and proof of US efforts to assert technological hegemony • The one thing that could flip Beijing’s calculus on managing open-weight releases, a major