The future belongs to artificial general intelligence (AGI). China and the United States are pursuing different strategies in the contest for global leadership.
But one US national security think tank wants to take the rivalry to an extreme. The Center for a New American Security (CNAS) has gone so far as to suggest that Washington consider extreme measures to stop China from achieving AGI first.
Jacob Stokes, one of the report’s authors and a former White House official, called on the US to prepare itself. He listed possible extreme measures, from diplomacy and espionage to cyberattacks and coercive steps. Among them: military strikes on Chinese data centers.
CNAS is headquartered in Washington and was founded in 2007. It has long advised the US government on defense, Indo-Pacific and China strategy. Its lean is hawkish.
Late last month, CNAS released a report titled “Superpowers and AGI”. The document reeks of gunpowder. It argues that the race for AGI, and the technology’s potential emergence, could profoundly affect US-China competition. It could also heighten the risk of military conflict or catastrophe on multiple fronts.
The Containment Checklist
To that end, the report urges US policymakers to act on several fronts. First, ensure that American resources and technology do not aid China’s AI development. Second, establish AI-focused diplomatic channels with allies and with China, so that the potential emergence of AGI is placed on the agenda. Third, develop a technically sophisticated method to track the inputs into AGI and the key performance thresholds of frontier AI systems.
The list goes on. Washington should conduct scenario exercises testing when and how the US should intervene to halt China’s AGI development. It should prepare to reverse-engineer or steal the technology should China obtain AGI first. And it should limit and contain the reach of authoritarian digital infrastructure.
The most extreme proposal of all is military strikes. The South China Morning Post reported on 4 September that Stokes, deputy director of CNAS’s Indo-Pacific Security Program, addressed an online event on Thursday.
His message was blunt. The US Department of Defense, the National Security Agency and other agencies should begin assessing what intelligence would be needed to justify such operations. That would pave the way for the “hard action” to follow.
The Cold War Playbook
Stokes served as a national security staffer under former US president Barack Obama. In the report he unabashedly lays out a menu of what he calls “diplomatic, espionage, cyber and kinetic measures.” Among them are military strikes on the data centers that train and run China’s AGI systems. He even touts preventive strikes before China develops AGI at all.
Stokes goes so far as to compare the undertaking to the way “in a past era, policymakers would learn about nuclear weapons.” His declared method is to “work backwards from the science to the policy implications.”
Citing assessments by research outfit Epoch AI, the report notes that the US currently leads China in advanced AI models by only “months.” But it warns that China could pull off an “unexpected technological breakthrough” in fields such as robotics and “embodied AI.”
Notably, Stokes also concedes a gap on the American side. The US government and its intelligence agencies have “not been organised for espionage to gather technological secrets for decades.”
“The Height of Recklessness”
Stokes’ extreme remarks have drawn questioning within the United States itself. William Hartung, a senior arms and defense budget expert at the Washington-based non-profit Project On Government Oversight (POGO), publicly slammed the report as “the height of recklessness.”
Hartung warned that any strike on Chinese data centers would “risk starting a shooting war between two nuclear-armed powers”. Such a war could bring tragic consequences for all concerned.
China has consistently maintained that AI should be people-centered and that intelligence should serve the good. Military applications must remain under human control. Beijing opposes turning technological issues into bloc confrontation or weaponry.
Make no mistake: technological competition is no casus belli. When individual American politicians and think-tank figures reach for threats of “military strikes” and “espionage” at every turn, they gravely violate the basic norms of international relations. They also expose a dangerous bid to politicize and militarize technology.
