This is the full text of a post from "The Obsolete Newsletter," a Substack that I write about the intersection of capitalism, geopolitics, and artificial intelligence. I’m a freelance journalist and the author of a forthcoming book called Obsolete: Power, Profit, and the Race for Machine Superintelligence. Consider subscribing to stay up to date with my work.

An influential congressional commission is calling for a militarized race to build superintelligent AI based on threadbare evidence

The US-China AI rivalry is entering a dangerous new phase.

Earlier today, the US-China Economic and Security Review Commission (USCC) released its annual report, with the following as its top recommendation:

Congress establish and fund a Manhattan Project-like program dedicated to racing to and acquiring an Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) capability. AGI is generally defined as systems that are as good as or better than human capabilities across all cognitive domains and would surpass the sharpest human minds at every task.

As someone observed on X, it’s telling that they didn’t call it an “Apollo Project.”

One of the USCC Commissioners, Jacob Helberg, tells Reuters that “China is racing towards AGI ... It's critical that we take them extremely seriously.”

But is China actually racing towards AGI? Big, if true!

The report clocks in at a cool 793 pages with 344 endnotes. Despite this length, there are only a handful of mentions of AGI, and all of them are in the sections recommending that the US race to build it.

In other words, there is no evidence in the report to support Helberg’s claim that "China is racing towards AGI.”

Nonetheless, his quote goes unchallenged into the 300-word Reuters story, which will be read far more than the 800-page document. It has the added gravitas of coming from one of the commissioners behind such a gargantuan report.

I’m not asserting that China is definitively NOT rushing to build AGI. But if there were solid evidence behind Helberg’s claim, why didn’t it make it into the report?

Helberg has not replied to a request for comment.

As the report notes, the CCP has long expressed a desire to lead the world in AI development. But that’s not the same thing as deliberately trying to build AGI, which could have profoundly destabilizing effects, even if we had a surefire way of aligning such a system with its ...

Adrian Garcia

Adrian Garcia

Adrian Garcia

Adrian Garcia