Anthropic's 2028 AI Scenario Paper Exposes China's Dual Paths to Bypass US Chip Restrictions

Anthropic published a research paper on February 25, 2025, outlining two possible scenarios for global AI leadership by 2028. The document departs from conventional AI safety discourse, reading more as a geopolitical risk assessment than a technical alignment paper. Its central warning: the United States retains a meaningful lead in frontier AI development, but that advantage rests on a fragile foundation of hardware dominance that China is actively working to circumvent.

The paper identifies two primary workarounds China has employed to close the gap. The first involves chip smuggling and access to overseas data centers, with US companies inadvertently supplying restricted technology. A recent federal case charged a Supermicro co-founder with diverting approximately $2.5 billion worth of servers to China through illicit channels. The second vectors cited involves what Anthropic researchers term "distillation attacks": the systematic creation of thousands of fabricated accounts on American AI platforms to extract and replicate model outputs at scale. Together, these methods suggest that export controls, while impactful, have not created an impassable barrier.

The implications extend across semiconductor supply chains, national security policy, and the competitive positioning of US-based AI laboratories. Anthropic's analysis signals that the window for maintaining unilateral frontier AI leadership may be narrowing faster than current policy frameworks anticipate. The paper stops short of definitive predictions but raises the prospect that compute-based dominance alone cannot serve as a durable strategic moat without complementary enforcement mechanisms and diplomatic coordination with allied nations controlling critical fabrication infrastructure.