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Anthropic frames AI competition with China as a now-or-never moment for Washington
Key Points
In a policy paper, Anthropic warns that the US must defend its lead in AI computing power against China.
Despite US export controls, Chinese labs stay competitive by smuggling chips and systematically copying American model capabilities through fake accounts.
Anthropic sees two scenarios for 2028: either the US closes these loopholes, or China catches up and pushes authoritarian AI norms worldwide.
In a policy paper, Anthropic lays out two scenarios for 2028: either the US locks in its compute lead over China, or authoritarian regimes set the rules for the AI era. The timing is no coincidence.
Anthropic has published an extensive policy paper that frames the AI competition between the US and China as a geopolitical make-or-break question. The core argument: democracies need to defend their lead in computing power, or they risk an AI era shaped by authoritarian regimes.
Compute, meaning access to advanced AI chips, is the critical bottleneck, Anthropic argues. Thanks to US export controls and innovation at companies like Nvidia, TSMC, and ASML, democratic nations hold a commanding lead in hardware. According to an analysis cited in the paper, Huawei will reach only four percent of Nvidia's aggregate compute capacity by 2026, dropping to just two percent by 2027.
Still, Chinese AI labs remain close to the frontier. Anthropic points to two reasons: chip smuggling and access to US compute through foreign data centers on one hand, and systematic distillation attacks on the other. In these attacks, Chinese labs use thousands of fake accounts to scrape the outputs of American frontier models and replicate their capabilities. Back in February, Anthropic accused Deepseek, Moonshot, and Minimax of generating more than 16 million Claude interactions through roughly 24,000 fraudulent accounts. OpenAI, Google, and the joint Frontier Model Forum have condemned the practice as well.