On 3 September, CNAS’s Jacob Stokes, promoting Superpowers and AGI, urged Washington to weigh diplomatic, espionage, cyber, and kinetic options so China does not reach AGI first. The author treats CNAS as an inside architect of U.S. tech-security policy (Red Lines, Adversarial Distillation) and reads “strike the data center” talk as moving the AI race from commerce to something like nuclear parity.

The U.S. side is framed as containment: tighter BIS controls on Nvidia/AMD chips, lithography, and HBM; outbound-investment screens; CHIPS Act fabs; ally “small yard, high fence” with the EU, Japan, Korea, and the Netherlands; and Pentagon war-games that treat AI plants as military targets. China is framed as self-reliance plus leverage: Huawei/SMIC, efficient models on weaker chips, “Eastern Data, Western Computing,” embodied AI in factories, rare-earth counters, Digital Silk Road, and hardened, dispersed compute.

The author’s conclusion is bleak: joint AGI work is off the table; the live risks are a chosen preemptive strike, an over-automated command chain, or machine error—any of which, the piece says, pushes both countries and everyone else toward catastrophe.

In touting his agency’s latest report, Superpowers and AGI, Jacob Stokes, deputy director of the Indo-Pacific Security Program at the Centre for a New American Security (CNAS), at an online event on September 3, called for the US government  to consider the feasibility of diplomatic, espionage, cyber and kinetic measures to prevent China from achieving Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) first.

CNAS is no ordinary American think tank. It is an influential Washington, D.C.-based bipartisan think tank specializing in United States national security and defense policy. Established in 2007, Western media laud it for its “pragmatic, data-driven research” and its role  “as an ideological bridge between administrations, staffed heavily by former high-ranking national security and intelligence officials”.

How Seriously Are Its Reports Taken?

CNAS reports regarding the China AI threat to the USA are taken extremely seriously by federal policy makers, Congress, and the current administration. CNAS is not seen as an outside voice, but as an intellectual........

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