Elon Musk says China is ‘on team humanity’, willing to work with US on existential AI threats

Elon Musk called himself “kind of pro-China” and said Beijing was willing to work on global artificial intelligence (AI) regulations as part of “team humanity”, in remarks made during a live audio conversation on his social media platform Twitter.

Musk, one of AI’s most outspoken sceptics, has argued that nations should come together to regulate and control the rapid development of the technology to mitigate civilisation-level threats and avoid a potential “Terminator future”.

“I’ve made this point in meetings with world leaders, including in China, and we’re actually in strong agreement that there should be AI oversight and regulation,” Musk told two US representatives on the call, adding that he believed Beijing was “definitely interested in working in a cooperative international framework”.

The Tesla and SpaceX co-founder was in China for three days at the end of May, visiting Tesla’s Shanghai factory and meeting high-ranking officials. Musk said he warned senior leadership that an AI-based digital superintelligence could usurp the power of the ruling Communist Party of China.

“I think that resonated because no government wants to find itself unseated by a digital superintelligence, so I think they are taking action on regulation and are concerned about this risk”, he said on the Twitter Spaces event that has since recorded over 2.8 million engagements, with 370,000 users having ‘tuned in’ as of Thursday.

Beijing has sought to lead the world in rolling out new AI regulations amid rapid advances exemplified by Open AI’s conversational bot ChatGPT. On Thursday, the Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC) published the country’s first regulations on generative AI as Beijing seeks to tame the technology.