The US and China are racing to build ever more powerful AI, but speed without safeguards risks catastrophic failure, political instability and dangers no country can contain.

The AI race between the United States and China is accelerating at a breathtaking pace. Time and again, the US has appeared to pull ahead, only to see China quickly close the gap.

At the heart of this competition lie two contrasting visions of how AI should be developed and deployed. While US firms largely rely on proprietary technologies to maintain their competitive advantage, China has increasingly embraced open-source AI, making advanced models widely available to developers around the world.

Different strategies notwithstanding, both countries are locked in an arms race which neither side is willing to slow. As speed becomes the overriding priority, safety increasingly takes a back seat, despite the uncomfortably high risk of catastrophic failure arising from the combination of human error and superintelligent AI.

A recent security breach involving OpenAI and Hugging Face has underscored the danger of treating safety as an afterthought. The incident occurred while OpenAI researchers were evaluating the cybersecurity capabilities of two frontier AI models. To identify weaknesses and vulnerabilities that sophisticated hackers might exploit, they temporarily disabled many of the models’ normal safeguards.

The experiment was conducted inside a tightly controlled ‘sandbox’. Although the models’ behavioural guardrails had been temporarily removed, the sandbox was supposed to prevent them from accessing the open internet, where they could – at least in theory – have caused enormous........

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