You can't constrain an idea whose time has come. China will continue developing AI regardless of whether we will. We have to do it just to stay in the race.

It's the same thing with the atomic bomb. There wasn't really a choice not to do it. All the theoretical physicists at the time knew that it was possible to develop the thing. If the United States hadn't done it, someone else would have. Perhaps a few years or a decade later, but it would have happened somewhere.