A former White House official has urged the United States to begin planning for extreme measures, including possible military strikes on Chinese data centers, to prevent Beijing from achieving artificial general intelligence first.
Jacob Stokes, deputy director of the Indo-Pacific Security Program at the Center for a New American Security and a former Obama administration national security staffer, made the comments during an online event on Thursday.
He said U.S. agencies, including the Department of Defense and the National Security Agency, should start determining what intelligence would be required to justify such actions.
“Trying to think through the particulars of that will be especially important, in part because it will help policymakers … start to work backwards based on the unique nature of the technology, in the same way that in a past era, policymakers would learn about nuclear weapons and … work backwards from the science to the policy implications,” Stokes said.
The remarks followed a new CNAS report he authored, “Superpowers and AGI,” published last week. The report examines how the possible arrival of AGI—a hypothetical system capable of human-level performance across a wide range of tasks—could reshape U.S.-China geopolitical competition.
It calls on the U.S. government to assess the feasibility of diplomatic, espionage, cyber, and kinetic options to keep China from reaching AGI first.
Stokes noted that the United States currently holds a months-long lead in frontier AI models, according to Epoch AI. He warned, however, that China could achieve a “surprise technological breakthrough,” citing its progress in robotics and other forms of “embodied AI.”
In that scenario, he argued, Washington should consider extreme steps, including strikes on data centers used to train and run a Chinese AGI system, and even preventive action before AGI is achieved.
The proposal treats military force as one option among others rather than an immediate recommendation. Stokes also discussed the potential for the United States to pursue espionage to obtain or reverse-engineer Chinese advances, while acknowledging that U.S. intelligence has not been organized for that kind of technological collection in decades.
No official response has come from the Pentagon, the NSA, or Beijing. The discussion highlights growing concern in some U.S. policy circles that a sudden Chinese leap in advanced AI could upend the current balance, even as questions remain about the feasibility, legality, and risks of targeting civilian infrastructure in a nuclear-armed rival.
Sources
- South China Morning Post: US urged to consider military strikes to stop China achieving AGI first
- Investing.com: From microchips to missile threats: How the U.S.-China AI race took a dark turn
