Huawei chair urges China’s AI labs to speed up development, warns they haven’t hit real safety risks yet

Huawei’s rotating chairman Eric Xu delivered a blunt message to China’s AI industry at the company’s Connect conference on September 17: you’re not moving fast enough. In a speech that doubled as a reality check, Xu argued that Chinese AI model providers need to accelerate development to the point where they actually encounter the frontier safety risks that leading US firms are already grappling with. Xu’s framing was notably different from the usual nationalist tech triumphalism. Rather than claiming China is neck-and-neck with US AI leaders, he essentially acknowledged a capability gap by pointing to the absence of frontier safety challenges in Chinese computing environments. Current Chinese computing capabilities, he argued, haven’t exposed domestic developers to the kinds of risks and edge cases that companies like OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google DeepMind routinely encounter. The prescription, in Xu’s view, is to balance aggressive development with proper risk management. Move fast enough to find the problems, but build the guardrails before they become catastrophic. What makes the statement particularly noteworthy is its source. Huawei isn’t some scrappy startup lobbying for few...