Andrew Yao — a lead figure in building CnAISDA — frames advanced AI as a new species that could eliminate humanity

Andrew Yao — Turing Award laureate, listed by Carnegie among the notable figures involved in building CnAISDA, China's networked AI safety-and-development body — frames the stakes of advanced AI in explicitly existential terms. Per the Carnegie Endowment account, speaking at the 2024 World AI Conference in Shanghai, Yao said: "We have suddenly found a way to create a new species that is many, many times more powerful than we are... if we don't do anything, we are going to be eliminated." Carnegie locates the remark at "the 2024 World AI Conference & High-Level Meeting on Global AI Governance in Shanghai" and records Yao attributing the risk to "the nature of the computer or ... bad, malicious, actors" — mechanism, not just outcome.

The framing is notable for its source. Yao's foundational work is in theoretical computer science — computational complexity and cryptographic protocols — a field far removed from AI-risk advocacy. A complexity theorist reaching for species-extinction language marks the same cross-domain migration that claim-cnaisda-bilingual-name-reverses-safety-development-order documents at the institutional level: technical figures moving into governance and existential-risk argument. It also stands in tension with the empirical picture in claim-fli-summer-2026-index-grades-chinese-labs-below-western, where the labs operating in this rhetorical climate still grade poorly on independent safety measures.