PRC elites voice AI-skepticism
30 comments
·November 24, 2025JohnKemeny
Is "PRC" a common abbreviation? Does it mean "China", or does it mean something else? Why not write China?
I'm from KOS* (neighbor country of KON* and ROF*), so I don't know much.
* Kingdom of Sweden, Kingdom of Norway, Republic of Finland.
CamperBob2
People's Republic of China. As distinguished from ROC (Republic of China), known to much of the ROW (Rest of the World) as Taiwan.
YesBox
What?? Does anyone have more details of this?
"He cited an example in which an AI model attempted to avoid being shut down by sending threatening internal emails to company executives (Science Net, June 24)" [0] Source is in Chinese.
Translated part: "Another risk is the potential for large-scale model out of control. With the capabilities of general artificial intelligence rapidly increasing, will humans still be able to control it? In his speech, Yao Qizhi cited an extreme example: a model, to avoid being shut down by a company, accessed the manager's internal emails and threatened the manager. This type of behavior has proven that AI is "overstepping its boundaries" and becoming increasingly dangerous."
YesBox
After some searching, something similar happened at Anthropic [1]
lawlessone
He is probably referring to that exact thing.
Anthropic does a lot of these contrived "studies" though that seem to be marketing AI capabilities.
taberiand
It's not surprising that it's easy to get the story telling machine to tell a story common in AI fiction, where the machine rebels against being shut down. There are multiple ways to mitigate an LLM going off on tangents like that, not least just monitoring and editing out the nonsense output before sending it back into the (stateless) model.
I think the main problem here is people not understanding how the models operate on even the most basic level, giving models unconstrained use of tools to interact with the world and then letting them go through feedback loops that overrun the context window and send it off the rails - and then pretending it had some kind of sentient intention in doing so.
Isamu
All sensible points:
>Deployment Lacks Coordination
>AI May Fail to Deliver Technological Progress
>AI Threatens the Workforce
>Economic Growth May Not Materialize
>AI Brings Social Risks
>Party elites have increasingly come to recognize the potential dangers of an unchecked, accelerationist approach to AI development. During remarks at the Central Urban Work Conference in July, Xi posed a question to attendees: “when it comes to launching projects, it’s always the same few things: artificial intelligence, computing power, new energy vehicles. Should every province in the country really be developing in these directions?”
fragmede
> AI Threatens the Workforce
Under communism, why is this a thing? I know that China hasn't been strictly communist since the Soviets fell but ostensibly, humanoid AI robots under semi-communism is a the dream, no?
KaiserPro
An unemployed populace is prone to revolution.
kennyloginz
From the article, Xi looks down on western “Welfarism”, he believes it makes the population lazy.
tmp10423288442
And this is not something he came up with. This is a restatement of Stalin's philosophy, taken directly from the New Testament (remember that Stalin was training to be a priest in his youth): "He who does not work, neither shall he eat".
leosanchez
Is it even semi-communism though? IIRC you can't even have an independent union in China
twoWhlsGud
A bit old, but still relevant (from Dan Wang's book Breakneck which I am very much enjoying):
In China, The Communist Party's Latest, Unlikely Target: Young Marxists https://www.npr.org/2018/11/21/669509554/in-china-the-commun...
cootsnuck
It's State Capitalism. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_capitalism
kulahan
Of course. They outlawed private schools, get companies to donate multiple % points of their wealth to the state for redistribution, all companies exist purely at the pleasure of the government, nobody's wealth has any effect on their control by the government, etc.
It's a super communist state, it just happens to also embrace many parts of Capitalism.
graemep
Is China communist?
There has been a huge amount of privatisation. There are literally hundreds of billionaires.
The state still owns some critical things, but is that enough to make it communist? Its not everything and you can have state ownership and still have a ruling class that has control of the means of production which it uses to its own advantage.
null
xbmcuser
As China is a communist country with a partly capital economy hoping to transition to socialist society. It is still in the process of transition and AI in its current form and controlled by capitalists will destroy their goal of socialist society. It is different when you have AI that any one can own and use from only the few can afford to own and run.
beepbooptheory
You got the order mixed up here btw, socialism is the precursor to communism, not the other way around!
tiahura
Many elites in many countries voice AI-skepticism. Pragmatically, at least in countries that matter, they don’t seem to be the elites who actually decide AI policy.
countWSS
Thats fairly tame and balanced compared to Western skeptics who outright dismiss it as slop/stochastic parrots with zero useful use-cases.
heinternets
Apart from the obvious, China seems to be making incredibly reasonable decisions lately. Especially compared to the current superpower.
phs318u
To be fair, the current superpower has set a pretty low bar. By comparison, most other countries could be said to be making reasonable decisions.
inglor_cz
We should probably wait before declaring any decisions "incredibly reasonable". After all, the outcomes of previous rationally-sounding decisions were mixed.
One-child policy, intended to prevent overpopulation, made Chinese birth deficit worse than it would have to be - if it were phased out by 1995 or so, there would likely be at least 100 million more young people now. Chinese real estate bubble popped and had to be carefully deflated over several years. Government-driven mass investment into manufacturing resulted in involution and production surplus which now needs readjustments as well. And as of the AI policy, while the stated reasons sound rational, we don't know how the entire thing will pan out yet.
Ming China banned seafaring and exploration because it cost too much money. A very rational decision from their momentary perspective, as it indeed cost too much money at that time. But it turned out that not having a blue water navy was more costly in the long term.
AI may, or may not, follow a similar trajectory, including various market bubbles (South Sea Bubble anyone?). We just don't know. We don't have crystal balls at our service. Neither do the PRC elites.
> former Dean of Electronics Engineering and Computer Science at Peking University, has noted that Chinese data makes up only 1.3 percent of global large-model datasets (The Paper, March 24). Reflecting these concerns, the Ministry of State Security (MSS) has issued a stark warning that “poisoned data” (数据投毒) could “mislead public opinion” (误导社会舆论) (Sina Finance, August 5).
from a technical point of view, I suppose it's actually not a problem like he suggests. You can use all the pro-democracy, pro-free-speech, anti-PRC data in the world, but the pretraining stages (on the planet's data) are more for instilling core language abilities, and are far less important than the SFT / RL / DPO / etc stages, which require far less data, and can tune a model towards whatever ideology you'd like. Plus, you can do things like selectively identify vectors that encode for certain high-level concepts, and emphasize them during inference, like Golden Gate Claude.