Anthropic urges Uncle Sam to kneecap China's AI ambitions before 2028

"Anthropic says it expects AI to deliver "transformational economic and societal impacts" in the coming years, and whether the transition goes well depends on where the most capable systems are built first. Since the technology is advancing swiftly, democratic countries have only a limited time in which to act, Anthropic believes. The measures it wants to see are nothing new: enforcing tighter export controls on chips used for AI development, such as Nvidia's GPUs, and cutting off access to American AI models."

"Recent history suggests these controls "have been incredibly successful," it says. But if Chinese researchers are only several months behind the US in AI capabilities, as many experts estimate, how successful can those efforts have been? AI labs in China have only built models that come close to those in America because of their talent and their knack for exploiting loopholes to get around export controls, Anthropic claims, along with distillation attacks that "illicitly extract the innovations of American companies.""

"Many will suspect this is Anthropic's chief motivation in calling for action against China. Back in February, the Claude model maker accused China-based rivals including DeepSeek of using distillation to train their models by siphoning knowledge from Anthropic's own. As The Register pointed out at the time, accusing China of copying, while using content created by others to train your own models, shows a staggering lack of self-awareness from the AI industry."

AI is expected to create major economic and societal changes, and outcomes depend on where the most capable systems are built first. Democratic countries are said to have limited time to act as technology advances quickly. Proposed measures include enforcing tighter export controls on AI development chips, such as Nvidia GPUs, and cutting off access to American AI models. The controls are claimed to have been highly successful, but concerns are raised that China may be only months behind the United States in AI capabilities. The claim is that Chinese labs reach near-US performance by leveraging talent, exploiting loopholes, and using distillation attacks to extract innovations from American companies. Prior accusations include that China-based rivals used distillation to siphon knowledge from Anthropic models.

Read at theregister