With Chinese tech giant ByteDance training a 10-trillion-parameter model, potentially for open source, the era of keeping frontier AI capabilities contained within sandboxed, Western labs is over. This proliferation makes regulation and control nearly impossible.

The concept that AIs can build better AIs, creating an accelerating feedback loop, is no longer theoretical. Leaders from Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google DeepMind have publicly confirmed they are actively using current AI models to develop the next generation, making RSI a practical engineering pursuit.

Recursive self-improvement is dangerous in four key ways: 1) AI capabilities outpace safety research, 2) a misaligned AI will build misaligned successors, 3) society skips learning from less-powerful intermediate AIs, and 4) it creates winner-take-all dynamics that encourage reckless racing between labs.

A significant portion of China's AI progress is "parasitic," relying on copying or reverse-engineering breakthroughs from leading US labs. Therefore, a unilateral US slowdown on R&D could be the most effective way to slow down Chinese AI development, contrary to the logic of a competitive race.

A US policy that slows down its own AI labs for safety is logically flawed and self-defeating unless it also effectively slows China's progress. Unilateral deceleration doesn't make the world safer; it simply cedes ground to a less safety-conscious competitor, increasing net risk.

Companies like OpenAI and Anthropic are not just building better models; their strategic goal is an "automated AI researcher." The ability for an AI to accelerate its own development is viewed as the key to getting so far ahead that no competitor can catch up.

Self-imposed safety pauses and regulatory hurdles on US frontier models create a vacuum. Chinese open-weight models like GLM-5.2 are now as capable as the *currently available* US versions, eroding the American lead while its most advanced models are benched, effectively ceding ground in the global AI race.

The proposal for US AI labs to slow down development is undermined by the fear that China won't reciprocate. Chinese labs are effective at incremental progress on existing paradigms, creating a classic security dilemma where any US pause could cede the technological frontier.

The concept of AI models improving themselves without human intervention (RSI) is considered likely and imminent. If RSI is real, attempts to regulate AI development via national bodies are a "fool's errand," as development can simply be moved to a sovereign location with the necessary chips, power, and connectivity.