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‘We are at a moment of peril with AI ... The sooner [it is regulated], the better’

Started 07 Sept, 12:11 2 events Updated 08 Sept
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latest: 08 Sept
  1. Political07 Sept, 12:11

    ‘We are at a moment of peril with AI ... The sooner [it is regulated], the better’

    Washington, United States

    ‘We are at a moment of peril with AI ... The sooner [it is regulated], the better’ The World Today iallan.drupal 7 September 2026 Sebastian Mallaby, the author of a recent book on Google DeepMind, tells Mike Higgins about the urgent need for regulation, why Europe will have to follow the United States’ lead and the way to talk to China about the technology’s safety issues. Listen also to the full podcast of their conversation. Before we get on to wider issues around AI policy, there was some big news in the AI labs this summer. Demis Hassabis, the subject of your new book ‘The Infinity Machine’, stepped down as chief executive of DeepMind, the British AI start-up he co-founded and in 2014 sold to Google. He is now DeepMind’s chairman while its new boss is based in Google’s California HQ, not London. Does that mark the end of era? It’s the end of the era of a major global AI lab being run out of London because that’s where Demis Hassabis insisted on it being based. He is patriotically British. He refused to move to California despite pressure to do so and ran DeepMind from London, setting the pace in artificial intelligence for a long time. He’s now the chairman of DeepMind; the new chief executive is now based in California at the Google headquarters, and that is a shift in the centre of gravity. But I think this narrative has been overblown. Demis Hassabis says very powerful AI is just around the corner, but we have failed to make it safe for humans. One angle is that Google is losing [the AI race]. It’s true that Anthropic has the most powerful models and that OpenAI is probably second at the moment. But DeepMind’s chatbot, Gemini, is used by more people than any other chatbot because it’s the default on all Android phones. It has a billion users of its app. That doesn’t count all the people who use it through Google search, Gmail or Google Maps. As for Hassabis, the story is he has been pushed upstairs, I don’t see it that way. From my discussions with him over three years, it was clear he wanted to do two things: build frontier AI and make sure it was used properly. I think he feels that he’s got to that destination in terms of frontier AI. He says we are in the foothills of ‘the singularity’, meaning very powerful AI is just around the corner, but we have failed to make it safe and useful for humans. There’s not much regulation, the regulation that does exist is a mess, and he wants to try to fix that. This year has seen growing alarm about AI mounting cyber hacks. OpenAI, Anthropic and Meta all admitted that their models had done so. Those hacks followed the apparent threat to the entire internet posed by Anthropic’s Claude Mythos model. As the pace of AI development shows no signs of slowing, where might we expect timely and effective regulation to come from? We’ve got models now that really do threaten the integrity of the internet infrastructure because they are so good at cyber hacking. The Claude Mythos model last April was able to discover these vulnerabilities which decades of human scrutiny hadn’t unveiled. The OpenAI models autonomously hacked their way out from supposedly secure ‘sandboxes’. That was extraordinary. The AI agents started to communicate with each other, posting on a message board, pooling ideas about how they would escape. The human overseers spotted the escape, patched the code, and thought they had solved the problem. But a few days later the AI agents broke out again and hacked their way into the website of Hugging Face, a software company that knows about cyber security. So, we are at this moment of peril. It’s a big regulatory challenge and it’s not easily solved. But a good starting point marries the art of the politically possible with what we would ideally want. The answer is you have the United States set up a self-regulatory body – not regulatory, because if it’s a straightforward government regulator, you have to appropriate funds from Congress. That is a nightmare. They won’t give you enough to hire the right scientists or have enough computing resources. A self-regulatory body is a practical way to get around those politics but would have the imprimatur of the government. Hassabis proposed this solution in an open letter a few weeks ago. That’s the one that makes the most sense and is supported by people across the industry. It doesn’t, so far, seem to be the one that the Trump administration sees fit to embrace but maybe that will change. Hassabis has said the successful rollout of self-regulation in the US could lead to global regulation. Given the differences of opinion about AI regulation, how quickly do we need to get our act together? The sooner, the better. The only question is whether we have to experience a kind of Hiroshima moment to get serious about doing something. How would an American self-regulatory body gain collaboration from the rest of the world? What I’m going to say here is very unpopular in Europe – but I think Europeans ought to like it. Essentially, Washington would compel its allies in Europe and Asia, everywhere apart from China, to get on board with its regulatory regime. That sounds like Uncle Sam just squashing everyone else’s sovereignty, but actually the European or British interest here is that there should be good regulation. And if that comes through forced coordination from Washington, I’d rather have the regulation than not have it. The US could successfully compel the rest of the world because it produces most of the AI stack: the chip designs, the actual data centres and most of the models apart the Chinese ones. If Europeans wanted access to American models, American cloud services, American chip designs such as Nvidia or AMD, they would have to agree. When the Biden administration imposed semiconductor export controls on China, chip makers such as Dutch firm ASML and its counterparts in Japan didn’t like it but had to go along. This is just an old story in the way America operates in the world. — US President Donald Trump, left, and Demis Hassabis, then chief executive of Google DeepMind, at a meeting of G7 members, partner countries and AI business leaders as part of the G7 summit, in Evian, France, on 17 June, 2026. Photo: Ludovic Marin / AFP via Getty Images. How does America get China to sign up? That is very difficult, but I think people in Washington exaggerate how hard it is to talk to China. In the American debate there are two kinds of China watcher, the hawks and the neo-hawks. The longtime, anti-communist hawks always said you can’t do anything with China. And then there are those who thought that by getting China into the World Trade Organization it might converge with our values, but they were burnt by Xi Jinping and his shift to authoritarianism. They’re the neo-hawks. An alternative, reasonable view is that China is a technological power, it’s a very big country. Be realistic about it. The way they’ve managed their energy supply during the Iran war is nothing short of awesome. They took a 50 per cent cut in their energy imports and suffered no recession. That’s how resilient they are. Then we need to talk to them about the joint interest we both have in not letting AI get into the hands of criminals, terrorists or other rogues. Like us, China doesn’t want the internet to be hacked by cyber attackers who are criminals. If good regulation comes through forced coordination from Washington, I’d rather have that than not. In the Cold War, there were flashpoint moments like the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962. But either side of that, in 1957, the US and the Soviet Union helped create the International Atomic Energy Agency, to set rules about tracking nuclear material. Then in 1968 they signed up to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. To those who say you can’t talk to Xi, Nikita Khruschev, the Soviet premier at the time, was not an easy person to deal with. But we did deal with him because we had a joint interest in preventing proliferation of nuclear weapons to third parties. It’s the same today with AI. Does Europe hold any cards in this race? Europe and the UK do have assets that matter. The biggest is ASML, an important Dutch company, which for the moment has a monopoly on the lithography machines needed to build the best semiconductors. Another is the British company ARM. Almost all smartphones in the world, including Chinese smartphones, incorporate ARM chip designs. If you are dependent on American data centres, they can switch you off if the White House gets annoyed with you. Also, AI friendly semiconductors are being bought and installed in European data centres. That is important because if you are dependent on American data centres, they can just switch you off if the White House gets annoyed with you. Nevertheless, the overwhelming balance of power is in favour of the US. In a difficult negotiation Europe would have to follow the American lead. But that’s not a bad thing. NATO, one of the most successful alliances of the past 80 years, wouldn’t have been effective without American leadership. And that was great for Britain, which had the good sense to embrace it. You visited China in the spring. What appetite did you detect for regulation? Before I went, AI policy people in the Biden administration told me, the Chinese don’t care about AI safety – when we were in office, they said, we invited them to Geneva to discuss AI safety, they sent unserious people to talk to us; and it was like pulling teeth just to get them to agree that AI should not be making the decision when it comes to nuclear weapons use. They would argue that in America, Russia and Europe, there was a sort of muscle memory of Hiroshima, Nagasaki, the Cuban Missile Crisis, that technology is dangerous, we have to control it. By contrast, to the Chinese catastrophe looks like the Cultural Revolution, a political thing that goes wrong. They would say, technology underpins our rise to prosperity, don’t get in its way. — Activists protesting outside the Scottish parliament in Edinburgh, on 3 September, 2026. Protesters gathered to demonstrate against data centre developments in their communities, calling on the government to consider the national impact on energy and water supplies, as well as local concerns over environmental and noise pollution. Photo: Jeff J Mitchell / Getty Images. That was the background to my China trip in March. My first meetings there were at Huawei. They didn’t want to talk about AI safety. But thereafter, I was impressed by how people in AI academia, in AI start-ups, tech journalists, people in big tech who are building AI models – they all did talk about safety, some of them quite insistently. While I was there, the OpenClaw AI agent was all the rage. It’s an open-source agent you can install on your laptop, which is crazy because you give it access to all of the data on your computer. The people I met agreed, saying the government needed to stop everybody downloading this agent, it’s dangerous. Sure enough, by the time I left China, the government had restricted use of OpenClaw. What I draw from this is not that China loves safety and is ready to do a deal. All I’m saying is that the door is at least open a crack. The problem in America is that the reasonable people are very much in a minority. That has to change. In the note he published this summer on AI regulation, Hassabis said new economic models will be needed to help everyone thrive in what he called a ‘post-scarcity’ world. You’ve written several books on finance. Will those economic models emerge? We have to be prepared for an economy that functions very differently. For instance, Dario Amodei, the chief executive officer of Anthropic, has said that 50 per cent of jobs will be disrupted by AI by 2030. But even if AI takes 5 to 10 per cent of jobs, that means those people will then be competing for existing jobs, forcing down the wages, maybe to a point where it is just not that attractive to work. So a relatively small hit to aggregate employment can have a big ripple effect on wages and the viability of doing work. It’s quite likely that this is going to happen.

    Chatham House – What's New
  2. Political08 Sept, 12:08

    What the West fails to grasp about China’s strategy to lead the world

    Washington, United States

    What the West fails to grasp about China’s strategy to lead the world The World Today iallan.drupal 8 September 2026 Xi Jinping wants to forge ‘a common destiny for humankind’ by winning over the Global South and taking Taiwan. But if America and Europe are to counter this ‘double pivot’, they must better understand ‘Xi Thought’, argues Steve Tsang. This article is published as part of ‘The World Tomorrow’, the magazine’s new strand for fresh ideas about the direction of global order. On 18 October 2017, delegates at the Chinese Communist Party’s National Congress listened to their leader announce a new political doctrine, ‘Xi Jinping Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era’. It discussed party discipline, national security and the direction of travel for China, among other topics. But as Xi outlined his doctrine for a de facto new state ideology, he also expressed something that none of his predecessors, not even Chairman Mao, attempted: a global strategy for China based primarily on his own thought. It was a remarkable moment in the history of Communist China’s foreign policy. In late 1978, Deng Xiaoping ushered in China’s ‘reform and opening up’ era. In the three decades that followed, China’s foreign policy adhered to another dictum of his – that China should ‘hide its capabilities and bide its time’. His successors Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao largely did just that, shying away from anything approaching a global strategy. This approach served China well as it led to western policymakers helping China to modernize and emerge as a potential superpower. Xi Jinping Thought That all changed with Xi Jinping Thought. Since taking office in 2012, Xi had consolidated power; but it wasn’t until his speech on the eve of his second term that he defined more clearly ‘the China Dream of National Rejuvenation’, with his vision of consolidating the party’s control over everything as an instrument for China to forge a ‘common destiny for humankind’ by 2050. Recent American administrations have made the mistake of thinking that China wishes to replace the United States as the global hegemon. It set out Xi’s plan to return China to global preeminence. Xi believes such preeminence will emerge if China can pull off a double pivot in its global strategy: establishing its leadership of the Global South and gaining control of Taiwan. The two are inextricably linked with his ambition, ultimately, of transforming the world order. Yet as important as it is to understand these goals, it is equally important to grasp Xi’s approach to foreign policy – something that the United States and other western powers often fail to. A conventional ‘realist’ assessment of China’s foreign policy emphasizes its national interest and its power relative to other nations. Xi and his regime certainly make those calculations. Yet, such an assessment risks failing to see that Xi’s ideological preferences and the security of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) trump all other considerations in Beijing’s global strategy. This makes China under Xi an unusual kind of realist actor, one which I and Olivia Cheung examine in our new book China’s Global Strategy under Xi Jinping – the term we use for Xi’s vision is ‘Sino-centric party state realism’. — China’s leader Xi Jinping, left, with President Abdel-Fattah el-Sisi of Egypt upon his arrival in Cairo on 1 September, 2026. Key to Xi’s global strategy is his influencing of Global South countries. Photo: Khaled Desouki / AFP via Getty Images. An understanding of what Sino-centric party state realism means for China’s global ambitions is crucial for western powers seeking to compete with and challenge Beijing. Many fail to apprehend the true nature of these ambitions. For instance, recent American administrations have made the mistake of thinking that China wishes to replace the United States as the global hegemon and impose a new world order. That isn’t the case, as I’ll argue below. It is also necessary to recognize that Beijing has no interest in enabling us to understand China’s global strategy – its interest is in getting us to understand it in ways that benefit China. But first, it is helpful to examine a key concept in this strategy. A ‘common destiny for humankind’ In the CCP’s official English translation of this concept in Xi Thought, the Chinese leader sees across the world an opportunity to build ‘a community with a shared future’. This phrase is routinely repeated by western policymakers, analysts and news media. It is an anodyne statement, deliberately so, and, arguably, framed to disarm and mislead. A faithful translation of the Chinese is ‘a common destiny for humankind’, which reveals a more concerning vision. A ‘common destiny’ for all does not emerge organically in a community of free and equal agents choosing to share a future; it needs to be forged by a leader, China. A ‘common destiny’ for all does not emerge organically – it needs to be forged by a leader, China. How might China forge this ‘common destiny’? By, in Xi’s words, the ‘democratization of international relations’. In this framing, China is not seeking to replace the existing international order or the US as the global hegemon with the legacies that would entail, such as undertaking the role of the world’s police officer. Instead, Xi’s ambition is for China to take over the leadership of the international order by securing the support of the Global South, thereby executing its first pivot. Global South countries represent a clear majority in the UN General Assembly and by population count. The modified order would be Sino-centric, based on Xi’s understanding of the traditional Chinese concept tianxia (see sidebar at foot of the article) – in theory at least, a fundamentally different model of global leadership to the American-led rules-based order. To expedite this ‘democratization’, China does not work to export its Leninist political system; rather, China’s aim is to help countries of the Global South resist the US and the West imposing their liberal-democratic political model on them. In pursuit of this goal, Xi has deployed enormous diplomatic and economic resources. Since 2021, he has announced four global initiatives, on development (2021), security (2022), civilization (2023) and governance (2025), complemented by the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), China’s global infrastructure and economic development strategy. In this process, China’s relations with the US have been relegated to a lower priority, contradicting the belief in Washington that Beijing is fixated on outcompeting Washington. Instead, Beijing pursues its global ambition by cultivating support from the Global South, which is defined loosely to include almost every nation outside the ‘democratic West’. By this formulation, when Chinese preeminence is accomplished the end of US hegemony is simply a by-product. Wooing the Global South Xi’s four global initiatives have attracted relatively little attention in the West. The US and Europe are not the intended audience. But the initiatives do appeal to the weaker democracies and autocratic regimes of the Global South whose leaders appreciate that Xi’s suite of initiatives not only commits China not to interfere in their domestic affairs but also gives them protection against others – the US and its allies primarily – from doing so. For example, at the Boao Forum of April 2021, Xi said: ‘We must not let the rules set by one or a few countries be imposed on others, or allow unilateralism pursued by certain countries to set the pace for the whole world.’ This is why many Global South leaders understand the Chinese rhetoric of the ‘democratization of international affairs’ implies a transformation of the international order from one imposed by a self-righteous and democratic US, as they see it, to a more hands-off alternative shaped by authoritarian China. — A TV news report broadcast in a restaurant in Taipei, Taiwan, shows the meeting between Donald Trump and Xi Jinping in Beijing in May. Xi told the US president their two countries should be ‘partners not rivals’. Photo: I-Hwa Cheng/ Getty Images. The attraction is reinforced by China’s offer of otherwise unavailable development loans without conditionalities such as accountability and transparency, via the BRI scheme. The scaling back of the BRI in recent years may have reduced the size of these loans but it remains substantial at close to $124 billion for 2025. The refined approach has made Chinese development projects more sustainable and subject to less abuse, without significantly reducing their value in cultivating support. The other demand Beijing makes of Global South countries is to give verbal support for its claim over Taiwan, which is cost-free to them. Little wonder that Xi’s global initiatives gain traction in more and more Global South countries. Beijing is asking Global South countries to give verbal support for its claim over Taiwan, which is cost-free to them. China has also used the support of Global South countries to expand and consolidate its control over important parts of key international organizations, of which the most important is the United Nations. For example, at the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs and the Human Rights Council, Beijing, with support from its Global South partners, has fundamentally changed how they operate and made them responsive to Chinese preferences in the past two decades. In this way, Beijing is building momentum for further changes within the UN, at a time when most western democracies are neglecting it and reducing their overseas development budgets. The unrelenting enhancement of Chinese influence at key international organizations is meant to enable China to make more decisive changes when it is ready. The Taiwan pivot The second pivot in China’s global strategy is to take Taiwan, in defiance of the US commitment enshrined in its Taiwan Relations Act (1979) to help the country defend itself against an externally imposed change in its status. Taiwan matters not so much because it is the top producer of critically important advanced microchips but because it lies in the middle of the strategically vital First Island Chain in the Pacific Ocean and has only remained beyond Chinese control thanks to US protection. If achieved, the taking of Taiwan, and the discrediting of the US in the process, would mark China’s assertion of its global preeminence. In Beijing’s approach to Taiwan, Xi has made a paradigm shift. To all his predecessors, including Mao, Taiwan was unfinished business from the Chinese Civil War (1946–1949), but none saw a need to specify a timeline for its incorporation into China. In contrast, Xi has made Taiwan central to his China Dream of National Rejuvenation, making 2050 the deadline for taking it. Beijing’s preferred outcome is to demonstrate overwhelming military superiority that pressures Taipei to submit to ‘reunification’ and thus remove the American raison d’être for intervention. Should this tactic fail, it will use force. The calculation is that success by either means will reveal US impotence to counter a spectacular Chinese move to take control of the First Island Chain. That would not only enable China to project power deep into the Pacific but would force key US allies such as Japan and South Korea to calculate if they can still rely on their respective defence treaties with the US for their security. If achieved, the taking of Taiwan, and the discrediting of the US in the process, would mark China’s assertion of its global preeminence. Crucially, it would link the dual pivots of its global strategy, ushering in an appeal to China’s supporters in the Global South to make significant changes to key international organizations. — Taiwanese army troops participate in the Han-Kuang military exercise, at a power station in Penghu County, Taiwan on 5 August, 2026. The 10 day-long exercises simulated a response to a possible invasion by China. Photo: Daniel Ceng /Anadolu via Getty Images. Should Xi’s global strategy come to fruition, the world as we know it will be relegated to history. Although its strategic goal, as expressed in ‘Xi Thought’, is formally limited to enjoying preeminence, as the premier state of the world China would, in effect, become the global hegemon. To the rest of the world, the distinction between preeminence and hegemony means little. A new world order dominated by China, which puts the interests of the Chinese Communist Party and its supreme leader at its core, is a world hostile to democracy, individual rights and human dignity, at least as they are understood in vibrant democracies. The deadline Xi has set for the fulfilment of his China Dream, 2050, is nearly a quarter of a century away. It implies that while China is unrelentingly working to implement its global strategy, Xi is not in a hurry. The democracies of the West and elsewhere that are worried about Xi’s vision have, to a degree, time to devise effective countermeasures. Each pivot in China’s global strategy provides inspiration. How the West might respond To counter China’s Global South pivot, the democracies of the West need to work together to engage China in what can best be described as a beauty contest. The liberal international order has been found wanting, which is why Xi’s proposed transformation gains traction in the Global South. A return to the previous version of the liberal international order is neither possible nor sufficient. Related work China sets out its vision for a new global order – but will it commit the resources to match its ambition? But by working in a collegial way with Global South partners to make the UN and other international organizations more representative and responsive to most nations and peoples in the world, the democracies of the West can provide a more attractive package than what Xi’s ‘common destiny for humankind’ promises. To do so, the US and Europe will have to re-invest heavily in overseas development aid, with better arrangements to enable the recipients to play an active role in making good use of them as they see fit. They also need to jettison what, from the Global South’s perspective, amounts to hypocrisy: while rich democracies talk about human rights as universal, they tend to only defend the rights of their own citizens. To counter China’s Taiwan pivot, the key is to exploit the overriding priority of Sino-centric party-state realism: that Xi will not do anything that jeopardizes his and the Communist Party’s hold on power. This means that however much Xi may want to take Taiwan, he will resist doing so if he knows an attempt will bring about a catastrophe likely to unleash forces within the party to unseat him. This opens a way to deter China. But American military deterrence alone is insufficient as Xi’s purges of his senior military officers mean that no Chinese general would dare to advise Xi to act on US military deterrence. To succeed, it must be complemented by economic deterrence, something that Xi instinctively understands. Xi’s purges of his senior military officers mean that no Chinese general would dare to advise Xi to act on US military deterrence. Nearly half of China’s economic ties in value terms are with the US, the European Union, Britain, Japan, Korea, Australia, Canada and New Zealand. For a highly externally oriented economy such as China’s, suddenly losing its ties with those countries would bring cataclysmic consequences, with potentially dire repercussions for the CCP. The democracies could coordinate to threaten Beijing in private with a break in economic ties before China invades Taiwan. If they did, Xi would need to determine if the damage to China’s economy would result in moves within the CCP to oust him. A calculated risk-taker rather than a reckless leader, he could be deterred, especially if western diplomatic efforts included a reassurance to Beijing that, should it respond favourably to the deterrence, the democracies would ensure that Taiwan did not cross Beijing’s red line and assert de jure independence.

    Chatham House – What's New

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