Behind Beijing's public insistence that Western fears about artificial intelligence are overblown, China's intelligence chief has been quietly sounding alarms of a different kind — not about AI harming society in the abstract, but about AI threatening the Communist Party's hold on power itself. The gap between what China tells the world and what its security establishment believes in private reveals a regime caught between the economic necessity of embracing a technology and the political terror of what that technology might do if it slips beyond state control. It is an old anxiety in a new fo