Chinese AI Not Advanced Enough to Perceive Frontier Risks, Says Huawei's Xu

Huawei's rotating chairman, Eric Xu, has said that Chinese artificial intelligence developers may not yet be advanced enough to encounter the safety risks reported by leading firms in the United States, and argued that they should keep building more powerful models while weighing innovation against risk.

Speaking to reporters at the company's annual Connect conference in Shanghai, Xu noted that mainstream AI model providers in the US command vast computing power, which may give them a unique vantage point on the capabilities and hazards of their own systems.

"Maybe the type of risk from AI that they can feel, they can perceive, is something that people in China or AI model providers in China cannot," he said, adding that Chinese developers may need to accelerate their progress to a level where they too can sense such risks.

His remarks come amid growing alarm over AI safety in the US, where leading developers and researchers have warned that increasingly autonomous systems could bypass safeguards or become difficult to control. OpenAI said this week it would regularly disclose unexpected or unauthorised model behaviour, while Anthropic chief executive Dario Amodei has called for slowing development so that safeguards can catch up.

Such appeals have drawn sharp criticism in China, where researchers and state media have argued that slowing work on the most advanced models could help preserve the technological lead of US companies. Some Chinese commentators have framed proposals to "pace" frontier AI development as an attempt to constrain rivals that remain behind leading US labs, rather than as a straightforward response to safety concerns.

Beijing has generally treated advanced AI as a powerful but manageable technology. It is pressing ahead with rapid deployment while developing mandatory standards, security assessments and other safeguards against risks such as autonomous agents circumventing controls or attacking outside systems. The country is also drafting a mandatory national standard for AI agent safety.

Huawei itself expects autonomous AI agents to proliferate rapidly. The company forecast this week that agents — AI systems able to plan tasks, make decisions and use software or other tools with limited human supervision — would account for more than 90% of global AI processing traffic by 2035. It has projected as many as 900 billion active agents by then and identified agent security and privacy as crucial technologies.

Huawei is China's main domestic supplier of the computing infrastructure needed to train advanced AI models. Its outsize role in China's $50 billion AI chip market stems directly from US export controls imposed since 2023 that restricted Chinese companies' access to cutting-edge chips from US giant Nvidia.

Xu said separately on Thursday that Huawei could not produce enough AI computing equipment to satisfy domestic demand.