In a policy paper, Anthropic urges the US and allies to enforce export controls, curb distillation attacks, and export US AI to hold the lead over China by 2028

We're releasing a new paper that explains our views on the competition on AI between the US and China.

Anthropic 2026-05-15

Context & Ripple Effects

Anthropic’s paper extends its earlier call for governments to move quickly on AI policy, but ties that urgency more explicitly to US–China competition and the protection of AI capabilities.

The subsequent coverage shows the tension in that approach: restrictions involving Anthropic’s models have already created uncertainty for overseas users and fueled arguments that service providers could turn to Chinese alternatives instead. India’s debate also illustrates how countries building AI ambitions on US-governed technology can become exposed to US policy choices.

First-order effects

Anthropic is publicly aligning its policy agenda with tighter export enforcement, stronger safeguards against model distillation, and wider distribution of US AI through allied channels.
Governments and AI service providers using Anthropic-linked technology face a sharper trade-off between access to US models and compliance with evolving US controls.

Second-order effects

Restrictions intended to preserve US advantages can make non-US providers reassess dependency on US-governed models; related coverage indicates Chinese models may become a more attractive fallback when access is uncertain.
Distillation protections would raise the strategic importance of model-access controls and deployment security, not just underlying model performance, for frontier AI vendors.

Third-order effects

If governments pair export controls with an allied distribution strategy, access to advanced AI is likely to become organized more explicitly around geopolitical blocs rather than a broadly neutral global software market.
The policy challenge will be whether controls protect leading US developers without undermining their overseas adoption; the related coverage suggests that overly disruptive restrictions can weaken the ecosystem they aim to defend.

The trend: AI policy is increasingly shifting from domestic safety and innovation rules toward a combined industrial, security, and export strategy shaped by US–China competition.

Discussion

@colemcfaul Cole McFaul on x
A few weeks ago, I joined @AnthropicAI as a Geopolitical Analyst! So excited to join the team at an important juncture in the US-PRC competition in AI. We just published a paper that explains some of our thinking on that competition, why maintaining US AI leadership is critical
@yashserai Yash on x
@AnthropicAI We have to decide what lead means. If the lead is only measured by being the best SOTA model, then it misses where the actual volume is going. Most production usage doesn't need SOTA. I'd rather have a DeepSeek-style model that runs on weaker hardware and stays cheap…
@teortaxestex @teortaxestex on x
...it's pretty damning that everyone took Mythos either at face value or as a psyop to inflate Anthropic's positioning vs OpenAI, but it's so transparently a political play. All the export control hawks were ecstatic about it. [image]
@mbajaj_ Manoj on x
@AnthropicAI the part most people will skip: distillation attacks. thousands of fake accounts systematically harvesting US model outputs to replicate frontier capabilities at a fraction of the cost. Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google have all confirmed this happening at scale. state m…
@cernovich @cernovich on x
Anthropic's executive team does not include anyone who is “MAGA.” They are all Covidians who oversaw censorship while at Facebook and other Big Tech companies, and supported mandatory vaccines. They are using patriotic language to run a con on the right. Will you fall for it?
@thdxr Dax on x
this perspective sacrifices nvidia and keeps AI labs the winner while saying it's about beating china you can also beat china by aggressively selling nvidia into their markets and preventing their inevitable self sufficiency of course that would sacrifice the AI labs instead
@anthropicai @anthropicai on x
We've published a paper that explains our views on AI competition between the US and China. The US and democratic allies hold the lead in frontier AI today. Read more on what it'll take to keep that lead: https://www.anthropic.com/...
@dariusparzygnat Dariusz Parzygnat on x
@AnthropicAI i'm with Jensen on the NVIDIA-China debate. blocking chips didn't stop China. it made China build the stack faster. and now the global AI package they can export is much stronger: - cheap solar - local chips - open-source models the US could have kept leverage at the…
@sahilpanhotra Sahil Panhotra on x
@AnthropicAI the funniest thing in this article is you shaped it as democracy vs CCP or USA vs CHINA but in reality its open source vs YOU if you really cared about democracy you would have open sourced your models too but you don't care about democracy you are just trying to use
@randileeharper.com Randi Lee Harper on bluesky
really disappointing to see anthropic dressing up a lobbying document as a research paper. chinese models are near-frontier intelligence at a fraction of the price, of course anthropic would lobby against them. no need to dress it up as saving democracy.
@isolyth.dev Eris on bluesky
Anthropic's policy people are really really stupid. We need mass GPU proliferation immediately so their ideal scenario CANNOT come to pass. I don't know else to describe this but ignorant of domestic authoritarianism and actively xenophobic against the Chinese people.
r/accelerate r on reddit
2028: Two scenarios for global AI leadership (Anthropic)
@bruces @bruces on bluesky
*Why is Anthropic (after all they've been through lately) somehow loudly pretending that Trumpistan is NOT an “authoritarian regime” — *Who is the audience for this, who somehow hasn't figured that out? Where is the choir that they're preaching to here — www.anthropic.com/re…
Robert Westphal Robert Westphal on linkedin
Anyone serious about AI, strategy and geopolitics, Anthropic's view on how the world plays out in 2028 released yesterday is essential reading https://lnkd.in/... . …
@scaling01 @scaling01 on x
Not only is Anthropic saying they will have a “country of geniuses in a datacenter” by 2028, but also that the US could be ahead by 12-24 months. Before GPT-5.5 and Claude Mythos chinese labs were ~8 months behind in broader capabilities and ~5 months behind in coding. However, […
@noahpinion Noah Smith on x
Export controls work
r/BetterOffline r on reddit
Anthropic is going all in on regulatory capture.
@bitinn@mastodon.gamedev.place David Frank on mastodon
I just lol at this, and remember this was posted while Trump was in China (which I think neither OpenAI nor Anthropic managed to put their people on the trip, but Nvidia's Jensen certainly was happy to go and sell some H200). — https://www.anthropic.com/...
@tianyuf Tianyu Fang on x
good thing that none of this has ever happened on Anthropic's watch [image]
@deliprao @deliprao on x
I am going to make some commentary on this blog post, so bear with me. Starting with 1) [image]
@firstadopter Tae Kim on x
Please tilt the playing field in our favor, while sabotaging long-term U.S. national security, harming other players in the AI ecosystem, and potentially sparking a major economic or kinetic war that costs us access to rare earths, so we can dominate the two years after our IPO
@ariaurelium @ariaurelium on x
I don't necessarily disagree with the geopolitical point but I just find the caricature this manifesto presents of Chinese AI researchers really disgusting the existence of political tensions between two countries does not erase your obligation to be respectful of your peers
@dan_jeffries1 Daniel Jeffries on x
The most revealing thing about this AI leadership paper is that it reads less like a vision for innovation and more like a glossy whitepaper for a 21st century East India Company. Every generation of incumbents discovers a new moral vocabulary for why they alone should control
@matthewberman Matthew Berman on x
LITERALLY WHAT I HAVE BEEN SCREAMING ABOUT LATELY “If the CCP integrates near-frontier AI systems quicker and more effectively into China's economy and the CCP security apparatus, and drives global adoption of subsidized, low-cost AI, then it could secure advantages over
@kakashiii111 @kakashiii111 on x
Not sure Nvidia will participate in Anthropic's next round. Sorry, Jensen.
@hamandcheese Samuel Hammond on x
Important point: Granting China greater compute access helps them diffuse their models globally and win the export race. [image]
@rnaudbertrand Arnaud Bertrand on x
The degree of projection in this paper is genuinely insane. Your regular reminder that Anthropic was the first AI frontier lab to actively work with the Pentagon and US intelligence agencies to help them with their global surveillance program. Back in 2024 already, they
@jeffladish Jeffrey Ladish on x
This is like writing a paper during the Cold War arguing for US nuclear dominance without mentioning the need for an arms control agreement or similar. Anthropic has a lot of thoughtful policy staff and honestly I think you guys can do better
@___harald___ Harald Schäfer on x
Both scenarios sound terrible. I don't want any government or company to control super powerful AIs that I don't have access to. Give everyone all the tools, so they can control their own destiny. I don't want to be “protected” by companies. Open-source or bust!
@championswimmer Arnav Gupta on x
“Huawei will just produce 4% of NVIDIA total compute in flops” is true only in a world where China continues to let Taiwan be independent. If all of these scenarios paint China in such monstrous terms, how does it not factor in the capitulation of TSMC ? Unserious writing.

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