Anthropic Urges U.S. to Lead China on AI to Safeguard Democracy and Counter Distillation Attacks

Anthropic said frontier AI models will shape more than industrial competition and could embed the governance values of the countries that develop them into global infrastructure. The company argued that if the United States loses its advantage over China in models and computing power, authoritarian uses such as surveillance and censorship could spread abroad. Maintaining the technological lead is therefore critical to democratic norms and national security, it said.

Anthropic’s latest policy report identifies 2028 as a pivotal point in the U.S.-China AI race, warning that chip smuggling, leaks of model weights and “distillation attacks” could rapidly erase the U.S. advantage. It recommends tighter AI chip export controls and stronger enforcement, as well as criminalizing distillation attacks that extract model capabilities without authorization. The report did not propose a funding amount for these policies.