By South China Morning Post | Created at 2026-09-03 22:16:40 | Updated at 2026-09-03 23:25:14
1 hour ago
The United States should start preparing for scenarios where extreme measures must be taken to stop China from achieving
artificial general intelligence (AGI), according to a former White House official, including state-backed espionage and military strikes on Chinese data centres.
Jacob Stokes, deputy director of the Indo-Pacific Security Program at the Centre for a New American Security (CNAS), said at an online event on Thursday that various US agencies, including the Department of Defense and the National Security Agency, should begin assessing what intelligence they need to justify taking such actions.
“Trying to think through the particulars of that will be especially important, in part because it will help policymakers … start to work backwards based on the unique nature of the technology, in the same way that in a past era, policymakers would learn about nuclear weapons and … work backwards from the science to the policy implications,” he said.
In a new CNAS report published last week, the former Obama administration national security staffer called for the US government to consider the feasibility of diplomatic, espionage, cyber and kinetic measures to prevent China from achieving AGI first.
AGI is a hypothetical AI system that can achieve human levels of performance across a wide variety of tasks. The report, titled “Superpowers and AGI”, explores how the imminent arrival of AGI might affect US-China geopolitical competition.
The US currently enjoys a months-long lead over China in frontier AI models, according to Epoch AI. However, China could make a “surprise technological breakthrough” that means it is close to achieving or achieves AGI first, Stokes wrote, citing China’s advances in areas such as robotics and other forms of “embodied AI”.
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