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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.
