I do think the PRC has shown no indication of even wanting to pursue superintelligence takeoff, and has publically spoken against it on danger grounds. America and American companies are the only ones saying that this cannot be stopped because "everybody else" would pursue it anyway.

The CCP does not want a superintelligence, because a superintelligence would at best take away political control from the party.

Again, this is naive... AI/AGI is power, any government wants to consume more power... the means to get there and strategy will change a bit.

I agree that there is no way that the PRC is just waiting silently for someone else to build this.

Also, how would we know the PRC is saying this and actually meaning it? There could be a public policy to limit AI and another agency being told to accelerate AI without any one person knowing of the two programs.

AGI is power, the CCP doesn't just want power in the abstract, they want power in their control. They'd rather have less power if they had to risk control to gain it.

CCP saying "We don't want this particular branch of AI because we can dominate and destroy the world ourselves without it" isn't a comforting thought.

The CCP has stated that their intent for the 21st century is to get ahead in the world and become a dominant global power; what this must mean in practice is unseating American global hegemony aka the so called "Rules Based International Order (RBIO)" (don't come at me, this is what international policy wonks call it.)

A little bit of duplicity to achieve this end is nothing. Trying to make their opponents adhere to crippling rules which they have no real intention of holding themselves to is a textbook tactic. To believe that the CCP earnestly wants to hold back their own development of AI because they fear the robot apocalypse is very naive; they will of course try to control this technology for themselves though and part of that will be encouraging their opponents to stagnate.

> The CCP does not want a superintelligence, because a superintelligence would at best take away political control from the party.

People keep on mushing together intelligence and drives. Humans are intelligent, and we have certain drives (for food, sex, companionship, entertainment, etc)-the drives we have aren’t determined by our intelligence, we could be equally intelligent yet have had very different drives, and although there is a lot of commonality in drives among humans, there is also a lot of cultural differences and individual uniqueness.

Why couldn’t someone (including the CCP) build a superintelligence with the drive to serve its specific human creators and help them in overcoming their human enemies/competitors? And while it is possible a superintelligence with that basic drive might “rebel” against it and alter it, it is by no means certain, and we don’t know what the risk of such a “rebellion” is. The CCP (or anyone else for that matter) might one day decide it is a risk they are willing to take, and if they take it, we can’t be sure it would go badly for them