by

June 29, 2026

8 minutes

Read Time

Commentary: Can America avoid a ‘Jack Ma moment’?

The US government is skating close to its own Jack Ma moment, when a government wounds a tech leader seemingly out of spite, say these New York Times writers.

Julian Gewirtz

Read a summary of this article on FAST.

Get bite-sized news via a new
cards interface. Give it a try.

Click here to return to FAST
Tap here to return to FAST

FAST

NEW YORK: A globally recognisable tech executive, high-spirited from preparing for a public offering, offers imprudent remarks criticising the government. The state strikes back harder than anyone expects. Overnight, the bargain between a skyrocketing sector of the economy and the government is shattered.

If you think this story could be about Anthropic, you’re only half right. In 2020, Alibaba co-founder Jack Ma found himself in the doghouse after he publicly rebuked Chinese regulators. Citing regulatory concerns, the authorities cancelled the public offering of Ant Group, another company Mr Ma helped found, and subsequently unleashed a regulatory storm that left few Chinese tech companies untouched.

The United States government is skating close to its own Jack Ma moment, when a government wounds a tech leader seemingly out of spite. Self-destructive American actions, not Chinese competition, may be the most significant threat to the evolution of artificial intelligence for years to come, long after the government and Anthropic resolve their current dispute.

On Jun 9, Anthropic released its model Fable 5, an adapted version of its powerful Mythos model, which has incredible capacity to find vulnerabilities in software. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei even said that companies that used Mythos had called it a “superweapon”. Three days later, the US government issued an export control directive blocking use of Fable 5 by foreigners and non-citizens – including some of Anthropic’s own employees – which prompted Anthropic to disable all access to the model.

Guess Word
Crack the word, one row at a time

Buzzword
Create words using the given letters

Mini Sudoku
Tiny puzzle, mighty brain teaser

Mini Crossword
Small grid, big challenge

Word Search
Spot as many words as you can

Show Less

A tangle of explanations behind this directive has been reported, including the risk of “jailbreak” (when a model bypasses built-in safety guardrails) and the risk of access by foreign adversaries. On Friday (Jun 26), the government permitted Anthropic to restore some users’ access to a version of Mythos, though negotiations are still underway about Fable 5.

AI RACE BETWEEN PUBLIC AND PRIVATE POWER

Over the past decade, the US government has used export controls to deal sometimes crippling blows to Chinese technology champions.

The action against Anthropic upended this logic by turning this policy instrument against American companies, purportedly to exert the US government’s grip over increasingly slippery AI models. The challenges of regulating AI at the frontier have now reportedly moved the government to ask Anthropic’s chief competitor, OpenAI, to limit the users for its own next model.

We often think of AI as a race between the United States and China. Instead we are seeing the emergence of an even more acute form of competition, between the public power of governments and the private power of ambitious companies.

Both countries are struggling to determine whether their frontier AI companies are national champions or national security threats. AI labs in both countries are also starting to realise how much their operations depend on the state’s sufferance.

The US government needs to strike a better balance between ambition and control, lest it irrevocably damage its relationship with these companies and America’s long-term technological edge.

The second Trump administration has careened from extreme to extreme on AI policy. It came into office de-emphasising some AI safety concerns, downplaying harms to workers and preaching the virtues of a hands-off approach.

Its stance shifted in March: The Pentagon designated Anthropic a supply chain risk after the company protested the use of its AI models in autonomous weapons and domestic mass surveillance. Reports about Mythos’ capabilities the following month appear to have shocked the administration into taking safety more seriously. The confrontation around Fable 5 has been the latest turn in a dance between a company that proclaims a desire for safeguards and an administration that wants unfettered control over these models.

The Chinese government, meanwhile, has been overseeing its AI labs for considerably longer. It requires security assessments and tests models for their ability to anticipate Beijing’s sundry political sensitivities. The state has blocked Chinese companies from purchasing advanced Nvidia chips in an effort to favour the domestic chip industry, even after the Trump administration cleared these chips for sale to China.

It has reportedly restricted overseas travel by certain AI researchers and told two of the founders of Manus, a popular AI agent that acts as a digital assistant, not to leave China while the government reviewed their company’s acquisition by Meta. The authorities soon after ordered the unwinding of the deal.

Unlike in the United States, in China no one questions who will ultimately win the struggle between state and corporate power. But the effects of the regulatory storm Beijing unleashed in 2020 remain evident.

Alibaba’s stock has lost around two-thirds of its value since Mr Ma’s speech and Ant Group has still not been able to go public. Venture capital funding in China collapsed and is only now rebounding. These days, nearly any conversation with Chinese AI labs includes bitter complaints about government overreach.

DIFFERENT AMERICAN AND CHINESE VISIONS OF AI FUTURE

The United States, with its system of legal protections and its deep capital markets pouring money into AI, is not likely to suffer to the same degree. The companies and government officials are likely to reach an understanding. But Washington and American AI labs need to treat each other with greater sincerity and seriousness going forward.

First, the heads of AI labs need to stop their doom trolling. It makes little sense to make panicked claims about the destructive potential of AI without a plan to work with the government to address those risks.

The current administration makes such cooperation particularly difficult because of its demonstrated willingness to punish companies to assert dominance or satisfy a political constituency. But the labs still must take more care to address AI’s transformative impacts.

Second, the US government needs to realise that the stakes of AI are far too high to allow a breakdown of trust. Despite a recent executive order that established a voluntary review program of highly advanced models, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has seemingly delighted in celebrating Anthropic’s troubles with the government. The administration has imposed major restrictions on Anthropic without offering sufficient explanation.

Even if the government is nettled by the attitude of AI chiefs, it is irresponsible to treat them with contempt. American allies are wondering if they can rely on American AI models, and talented foreign researchers in American labs are reconsidering their career plans – neither of which serves American interests.

Third, America’s government and its AI labs need to update their understanding of Chinese AI. Beijing’s pronouncements on AI are distinctly less apocalyptic than Anthropic’s; Chinese firms are less able to invest in data centres (for lack of American chips) and more interested in applying AI to physical technologies.

By most appearances, China is pursuing a substantially different vision of the AI future. Frictions within China may present an opportunity for the United States to put further distance between Chinese entrepreneurs and the overbearing Chinese state – but that would require the administration to drop policies that seem hostile toward foreign talent, including Chinese citizens.

The AI chaos of recent weeks is self-defeating. For the United States to win the AI future, it needs to do better at avoiding the missteps of Beijing.

Dan Wang is a research fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution and the author of Breakneck: China’s Quest to Engineer the Future. Julian Gewirtz, a senior research scholar at Columbia University, served as senior director for China and Taiwan Affairs at the National Security Council and deputy China coordinator at the State Department. This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

Source: New York Times/zw

Inbox