Hey, Xi — Good Luck Keeping AI on a Communist Leash

Merely wanting to make some photocopies at work in the old Soviet Union raised Brezhnev's considerable eyebrows, and actually getting them made was like something out of a Kafka story. Let's say Ivan in Akounting needed to make 20 copies of a one-page interoffice memo. Instead of just going to the Xerox, putting the memo on the glass, setting the counter to 20, and hitting the start button, Ivan first had to file a request for authorization to use the Xerox. 

That's when the fun began.

Before getting authorization, Ivan had to ask someone in authority to inspect the document in question. If the memo passed, it would be given to an authorized photocopy machine operator working in a locked special room. That guy would generate the copies, log the number generated, and only then could the copies be distributed to the proper personnel. Each copier included a tamper-proof counter examined regularly by official inspectors.

Discrepancies were not treated lightly, comrade.

The reason? A simple copier, left unattended, could allow any old dissident to produce samizdat — "self-publishing" — pamphlets or even newspapers containing information critical of the Party, distributed outside of official channels.

Authoritarians hate that.

Then along came the fax machine, and fuhgeddaboudit. When Soviet hardliners belatedly attempted to depose Gorbachev in the 1991 coup, they shut down most radio, TV, and newspaper presses. But they couldn't stop reporters and dissidents from using fax machines to get the truth out — which proved to be another nail in the failed coup's coffin.

I bet you knew all of this stuff back in the '80s and early '90s, but it's easy to forget the absurdities a totalitarian state will impose to maintain power.

Perhaps that's why Axios failed to see the true import of the news that Axios itself reported on Tuesday about China's AI ambitions, needs, desires, and Kafkaesque contradictions.

The report was ostensibly about how a "U.S.-China 'red telephone' could bring a Cold War guardrail to AI," but the real news was buried just deep enough that reporter Zachary Basu never took proper note of it.

Here it is:

China is every bit as determined to win the AI race, but its leader Xi Jinping — who lands in Washington Wednesday for his first state visit since 2015 — is balancing two competing fears:

1. Falling behind: Xi has no interest in a safety regime that freezes the race with America still ahead. Beijing is pushing cheap, capable open-source models around the world while portraying U.S. chip controls and calls for restraint as a calculated effort to keep China down.

2. Losing control: Xi wants AI powerful enough to transform China's economy, but never so powerful that it slips beyond the control of the Communist Party. Beijing focuses less on Silicon Valley-style extinction scenarios than on nearer-term dangers, like cyberattacks, malicious use and disruptions to critical infrastructure.

That's the lede, not some notional AI hotline — which is a pretty good idea, actually.

So let's look at this more closely.

Beijing is “pushing cheap, capable open-source models around the world” and Xi wants AI “never so powerful that it slips beyond the control of the Communist Party.” Which is like giving your teenage son a 1,000-horsepower Ferrari, but insisting that he keep his speed to 55 mph.

Then being totally surprised to hear him peel out approximately 15 seconds after handing him the keys.

Once Chinese open-weight AIs like Qwen, DeepSeek, Kimi, and the rest are out on Hugging Face for distribution, they're out there for anyone to use as they see fit — including stripping any safety controls imposed by the CCP. Imagine Soviet photocopiers that gathered their own news, then printed and distributed their own samizdat. 

"Powerful enough to transform China's economy, but never so powerful that it slips beyond the control of the Communist Party?"

Yeah, that isn't how that works. 

The political and economic culture of the US isn't just built to withstand disruption; it's built to generate disruptions — one after another, time and time again. Businesses get lazy, leaning on the old ways, and more innovative ones emerge. A political party falls behind the times? It loses an election or three until it mends its ways. Most of the time, anyway.

Totalitarian regimes are strong, but often prove brittle when hammered by disruptive technology.

Just ask the Soviets, assuming you can find any.

Recommended: Xi and You and a Guy Named Zhang

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