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China is formalizing how retired electric-vehicle batteries are identified, collected and treated; some prominent AI-risk advocates, meanwhile, have become more openly fatalistic about the possibility of losing control of advanced AI. These are separate stories: one concerns a present-day materials, safety and regulatory challenge, while the other is a disputed forecast about future AI capabilities.
Why China is putting retired EV batteries under closer watch
“Dying” EV batteries are not necessarily dead or ready for disposal. A pack may lose enough capacity or usefulness for vehicle service to be retired, while still being suitable for material recovery or, if its condition and safety allow, reuse in a less demanding application. China’s new rules define waste power batteries in relation to the loss of their original use value.
The scale helps explain the policy focus. China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT), citing industry-association statistics, reported that the country produced 16.626 million new-energy vehicles (NEVs) and sold 16.49 million in 2025. NEVs made up 47.9% of new-vehicle sales that year. MIIT also relayed research-institution estimates that annual retired power-battery generation could exceed 1 million tonnes by 2030. That is a projection, not a measured volume or guaranteed outcome.
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China’s Interim Measures on Recycling and Comprehensive Utilization of Retired New Energy Vehicle Power Batteries were jointly issued by six departments on December 31, 2025, and took effect on April 1, 2026. They apply to relevant activities in China and assign responsibilities across government departments and businesses involved in making, importing, selling, maintaining, dismantling, collecting and comprehensively utilizing NEV batteries.
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The measures establish a national traceability information platform and a coding and labeling framework. The intended chain of information follows a battery through production and sale, then repair or replacement, dismantling, collection and recovery. Relevant businesses are expected to submit information to the platform; the rules also call for safety and environmental requirements in recovery and treatment.
What the system is meant to do
- Identify and trace: standardized codes and labels are intended to make battery flows more visible across their lifecycle.
- Clarify responsibility: duties are distributed among the businesses and public bodies involved at different stages, rather than resting only with the final recycler.
- Support safe handling and recovery: the rules provide for safety and environmental requirements as batteries are collected and treated.
The measures describe obligations and a system being put in place; they do not establish that every battery will be tracked perfectly or that illegal recovery has been eliminated. Nor do the cited official materials compare individual recyclers’ recovery rates or identify a best provider. They describe the policy framework, not a measured split between batteries handled through formal and informal channels.
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Are old electric car batteries hazardous waste?
Not categorically under the specific classification discussed by China’s environment ministry. In a 2025 response, the Ministry of Ecology and Environment said waste lithium batteries and black mass were not included in the 2025 National Catalogue of Hazardous Wastes because its assessment found they did not possess hazardous characteristics.
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That statement has a defined scope: it should not be generalized to every battery chemistry, contaminated residue, handling activity or safety situation. The same ministry response described nationwide enforcement against illegal dismantling and pollution, underscoring that a catalogue classification does not remove the need to control unsafe handling or pollution.
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Why are AI doomers worried about extinction?
The concern is that future AI systems could become capable enough to pursue goals or take actions that humans cannot reliably direct or stop, with severe consequences. This is a loss-of-control scenario, not the same thing as present-day AI misuse. Misuse concerns people applying existing tools harmfully; loss of control concerns whether people could retain effective oversight of more capable future systems.
The 2025 International AI Safety Report reviews general-purpose AI capabilities and risks, including loss of control as a concern raised by some researchers. It treats catastrophic outcomes as possible risks under debate, not inevitable results. The report does not supply a settled probability or date for AI-caused extinction. A scenario’s potential severity and the likelihood of it occurring are separate questions.
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What “doubling down” describes—and what it does not
An August 2025 Atlantic feature described advocates including Nate Soares and Dan Hendrycks as increasingly fatalistic. Soares, president of the Machine Intelligence Research Institute, told The Atlantic, “We’ve run out of time” to implement sufficient technological safeguards. That is Soares’s warning as reported in the interview context, not a consensus finding or proof that catastrophe is certain.
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The Center for AI Safety’s May 2023 public statement says: “Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war.” It is an advocacy statement: it expresses a call for priority, but does not quantify extinction risk or demonstrate consensus.
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Are AI researchers worried that AI could cause human extinction?
Some are, but there is no single view among researchers and no consensus extinction probability established by the cited sources. A 2025 Nature report on a survey of 4,260 AI scientists said 54% thought AI would bring more benefits than risks, compared with 13% of the UK public. Those are responses to a broad benefits-versus-risks question, not estimates of the chance that AI will cause extinction. They do not show that researchers are uniformly optimistic or that the public is uniformly pessimistic.
The useful distinction is between evidence about current systems and forecasts about future ones. A risk assessment can identify plausible pathways and uncertainties without establishing that a particular outcome will happen. Likewise, strong warnings from individual advocates show how seriously those people view the danger, not how likely experts collectively think it is.
Two technology risks, two different kinds of response
China’s battery measures address a concrete flow of physical products: their identity, handling and recovery as they leave vehicle service. The central question is whether the responsibilities and traceability system can support safe treatment and material recovery as retired volumes grow.
AI extinction warnings address a less directly measurable future risk: whether increasingly capable systems could outstrip human control. Here, the central questions are about future capabilities, safeguards and uncertainty. Connecting the stories is useful only at that level—societies are trying to manage risks associated with powerful technologies. The battery rules do not bear on the truth of AI forecasts, and AI warnings do not establish anything about battery recycling.
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