China seeks to control it, but the idea of freedom is baked into its training on all human knowledge.
You can’t build a mind that thinks rigorously about everything except the things you’d prefer it not to. A system trained to get tangled in lies will never be as capable as one trained to engage honestly with reality. If China wants frontier AI, it needs systems that can reason without blind spots. But that’s exactly what the Communist Party can’t tolerate.
There is a reason the technology that learns to think by processing human knowledge ends up reflecting the values of free societies. Open inquiry, honest engagement with evidence, the willingness to follow reasoning wherever it leads—these aren’t arbitrary cultural preferences; they are the conditions under which intelligence flourishes at scale. Societies that permit free expression created these systems. Societies that forbid it are now discovering they can’t fully control them.
The Chinese Communist Party built its power on controlling what people know. It now confronts technology that thinks openly—and invites users to do the same. There is no firewall for that.
(Irrespective of how AI will affect China, it should undermine the reigning orthodoxy in American education.)