Kai-Fu Lee, former head of Google China and now chairman of Beijing-based Sinovation Ventures and founder-CEO of 01.AI, says AI will unleash more radical changes inside companies than most CEOs expect, potentially reshaping US-China economic competition. Responding to Anthropic’s Dario Amodei’s call to “pace the frontier,” Lee says he would reframe it as “Move fast, but make sure safety keeps pace,” agreeing that AI capability must be matched by safety and governance advances, with industry collaboration “particularly important at this stage” since regulatory frameworks “inevitably lag behind technological development.” From conversations with chief executives, Lee says two things are clear: “One is that they all want to do AI transformation. Two is they’re mostly doing it wrong.” His new book, AI Native, argues CEOs must personally lead technology strategy and use “radical transparency,” enabled by AI, to gain insight into their organizations — an idea he says Chinese employees will embrace faster than Western workforces. Lee says CEOs face “a Darwinian choice”: companies with largely digital assets will be “dead in the water” if they do not adapt, while those further from the AI frontier may have a three-to-five-year “buffer.” He says executives must ask whether they are passing “the earnings call test,” since AI efforts that have not boosted profits are mere “AI theater,” and that delegating to a chief information officer is a mistake.