If there is one person who represents the frontier of Chinese artificial intelligence, it is Tang Jie.
The soft-spoken data engineer is the co-founder, chief scientist and largest individual shareholder of China’s leading artificial intelligence lab, Z.ai, whose models have risen to the top tier of China’s performance tables and made Mr. Tang the flag-bearer for the Chinese A.I. ecosystem.
In some ways, Mr. Tang’s messaging about A.I. seems to mirror that of Dario Amodei, the co-founder and chief executive of Anthropic — the American company behind Claude — and one of the most prominent voices extolling A.I.’s promise while warning of its risks. Mr. Tang pairs an almost utopian excitement with what he has called the “heaviest responsibility” of “extreme safety governance.”
“Once a technology reaches a magnitude of power sufficient to alter the course of civilization, safety is no longer an accessory, but the fundamental precondition for that technology to survive and to be permitted for use,” Mr. Tang said in a letter to staff that was leaked to the Chinese media in July.
Those words may sound strikingly similar to warnings now coming from leading American A.I. labs. But they are better understood through the language of President Xi Jinping of China, for whom A.I. “safety” is ultimately bound to one overriding concern: the security of the Chinese Communist Party regime.
While the debate in Western capitals has centered on the dangers A.I. poses to society, the animating concern in China is the threat it poses to the state. Chinese models are already well known for filtering or avoiding politically sensitive information in ways that reflect state censorship. But developers like Mr. Tang are going further, working to embed Communist Party orthodoxy deeply into the models, with potentially far-reaching implications for the values and vulnerabilities that Chinese A.I. systems bring with them.
