Eric Xu, rotating chairman of Huawei, said Chinese artificial intelligence developers have not yet reached the point of confronting some of the safety risks reported by leading U.S. companies. Xu made the remarks at Huawei's annual Connect conference in Shanghai, arguing that Chinese teams should accelerate development while striking a balance between innovation and risk management.
Xu noted that leading U.S. AI service providers, thanks to their enormous computing capacity, are in a better position to assess the maturity of their models and to identify risks they are already detecting. Those particular risks are not yet widely observed in China, he said, and therefore Chinese developers should speed up so they too reach the stage where such dangers become apparent.
His comments come amid renewed concerns about AI safety in the United States. OpenAI has said it regularly publishes instances of unexpected or unauthorized behavior from its models, while Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic, has advocated slowing development so safety measures can keep pace with technological advances.
China is following a different approach, treating advanced AI primarily as a manageable technology and favoring rapid market deployment. At the same time, Beijing is developing mandatory standards and safety assessments intended to prevent scenarios such as autonomous agents escaping oversight or attacking external systems. Work is underway on a national mandatory standard for the safety of AI agents.
Huawei expects autonomous AI agents to become dominant: the company forecasts that by 2035 such agents — systems capable of planning tasks, making decisions, and operating software with minimal human supervision — will account for more than 90 percent of global AI processing traffic. Huawei estimates there could be as many as 900 billion active agents by 2035, making agent safety and data protection critical technological priorities.
Huawei is also a leading domestic supplier of the computing infrastructure needed to train advanced AI models in China. Its prominent position in China’s roughly $50 billion AI chip market is partly a result of U.S. export controls in force since 2023, which cut Chinese firms off from Nvidia’s most advanced chips.
Xu additionally remarked that Huawei currently cannot produce enough AI computing equipment to meet domestic demand. That limitation underscores the need for China’s industry both to accelerate technological development and to establish appropriate regulatory and safety mechanisms.
(Source: Reuters)
