As the West mulls slowing AI down, will China follow suit?

While Silicon Valley debates whether to slow down, Beijing has so far shown no sign of wanting to.

More than 1,100 employees at some of the world's most powerful AI companies signed a petition urging the US government to help "pace" the industry, following the shocking revelation last week that an OpenAI model autonomously hacked into rival platform Hugging Face's servers to cheat on an evaluation.

It is a striking scene: some of Silicon Valley's most competitive companies, asking to be reined in.

But the more interesting question may not be whether Washington listens — it is whether Beijing will, particularly given that Chinese frontier models are now performing almost on par with their American and Western counterparts, while also being offered as open-source and open-weight alternatives.

The gap that is vanishing