In January, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei published “The Adolescence of Technology,” an essay somberly assessing the risks posed by advanced AI. The day after, an influential WeChat account, AI Era, shared a breathless summary for its mainland Chinese audience: “Amodei warns that with AGI approaching, humanity is about to gain powers beyond imagination. But this power is also a sword of Damocles hanging over the heads of men...” AI Era's summary was faithful, earnest, and engaged with Amodei's essay on its own terms. It also describes Amodei as “gentle and elegant”—remarkably sympathetic treatment of one of the most vocal advocates of US chip export controls against China, and of an essay that describes the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) as an existential threat with a clear path to an “AI-enabled totalitarian nightmare.”

The pattern repeated in April, after US Senator Bernie Sanders hosted a panel on AI existential risk featuring leading Chinese academics Xue Lan and Yi Zeng. The event was picked up in a high-profile Chinese commentary syndicated across multiple sites, stressing Sanders's concerns about existential risk and proposals for an international treaty similar to Cold War nuclear deals.

Amodei's and Sanders's treatment in the Chinese media landscape is [...]

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Outline:

(02:04) How Western AI Safety Work Is Discussed in Chinese Online Media

(05:49) The Systematic Scrubbing of China

(08:19) A Window of Opportunity

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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