Kamala Wants An AI Slowdown Treaty With China. What Could Go Wrong?

Former Vice President Kamala Harris joined calls to slow the development of advanced artificial intelligence, urging the United States to pursue a treaty with China.

“The United States must continue to lead the world in developing AI technology even as we seek to impose common-sense safety standards,” Harris said on Monday. “The president must do his job to protect America’s interests by pursuing a treaty with countries like China to stop dangerous uses of AI, limit the speed of its development, and adopt global standards for testing.” 

Harris entered the escalating debate over frontier AI after Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei urged the industry to slow the development of the increasingly capable systems. Elon Musk, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, and other prominent technology executives subsequently expressed support for Amodei’s proposal. 

China, however, pushed back, calling the warnings “fearmongering.”

“Fearmongering, confrontation and malicious competition will only disrupt the process of global AI governance and serve no one’s interests,” Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Guo Jiakun reportedly said at a news briefing. 

Even if Beijing signed a treaty, whether China would comply with its terms would be another question. China has a history of failing to keep commitments it made to the United States.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent called China an “unreliable partner” in April, accusing the country of stockpiling oil during the U.S.-Israeli war in Iran, even as the conflict strained global energy supplies.

 “They continued buying, and they’ve been hoarding, and they have cut off exports of many products,” ‌Bessent ⁠said.

“China has been an unreliable global partner three times in the past five years; once during COVID, when ​they hoarded healthcare products, second on rare earth,” he added, citing the oil stockpiling as his third example.

Bessent was referring to Beijing’s 2025 threat to stop exporting rare earth minerals to the United States during trade negotiations. 

China also fell short of the purchase commitments in its 2020 Phase One trade agreement with the United States. Beijing pledged to buy an additional $200 billion in American goods and services during 2020 and 2021 but ultimately bought none of that additional amount, according to the Peterson Institute for International Economics. 

David Sacks, Trump’s former White House AI and cryptocurrency czar and current co-chair of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, argued that Beijing would be unlikely to participate in an international slowdown.

“China is very unlikely to join a global agreement, as you know, and that has to be taken into account as well,” he wrote.

Palantir CEO Alex Karp similarly argued that competition with China makes a unilateral American pause untenable.

“If we didn’t have adversaries, I would be very in favor of pausing this technology completely, but we do,” Karp told CNBC. “You can’t pause it because it’s a structural advantage.”

President Donald Trump also argued against slowing AI development when asked about the proposal.

“We’re leading China in AI,” Trump said. “We’re the most sophisticated country in the world, and frankly, I want to keep it that way because whoever wins AI, wins.”

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