Huawei Executive Says China's AI Not Yet Facing 'Frontier Risks' Seen in US

A top Huawei executive has suggested that China's artificial intelligence models are not yet powerful enough to face the kind of safety risks being identified at the frontier of U.S. AI development. Speaking at a conference in Shanghai, rotating chairman Eric Xu argued that Chinese developers should accelerate their pace to a level where they can perceive similar risks, while striking a balance between innovation and regulation.

A Call to Accelerate

Speaking to reporters at Huawei's annual Connect conference, Xu contrasted the capabilities of Chinese and U.S. AI providers, attributing the difference to the massive computing power available to American firms.

"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," Xu stated. He added, "I think maybe AI model providers in China may need to speed up their pace to the level that they could also feel the risks from AI development."

Xu's comments position China's AI industry at a different developmental stage, where the primary focus remains on advancing capabilities rather than mitigating the unforeseen dangers of highly autonomous systems.

Diverging Approaches to AI Safety

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The perspective from Huawei highlights a growing divergence in how the world's two largest economies are approaching AI governance. In the United States, concerns over safety have intensified, with firms like OpenAI committing to disclose unexpected model behavior and executives from Anthropic calling for a slowdown in development to allow safeguards to improve.

In contrast, China has generally treated advanced AI as a manageable technology, pushing for rapid deployment while simultaneously developing a framework of mandatory standards and security assessments. According to the source, Beijing is currently drafting a national standard specifically for the safety of AI agents.

Market Context and Huawei's Role

Huawei is central to China's AI ambitions, serving as the country's primary domestic supplier of computing infrastructure for training advanced models. This role has been magnified since U.S. export controls implemented in 2023 restricted Chinese firms' access to high-end chips from market leader Nvidia.

The demand for this infrastructure is immense. Xu separately noted on Thursday that Huawei cannot produce enough AI computing equipment to satisfy domestic demand. The company itself is bullish on the technology's future, forecasting that autonomous AI agents will account for more than 90% of global AI processing traffic by 2035, with as many as 900 billion active agents operating by that time.