China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs on Monday rejected Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei’s call for the United States to curb China’s artificial intelligence capabilities while pursuing a global slowdown in AI development. U.S. President Donald Trump and Chinese leader Xi Jinping are expected to discuss AI governance among other topics at a meeting planned for Sept. 24.
In an essay published Saturday, Amodei warned that a “Chinese lead in AI would pose grave danger for the United States and the world.” He urged the United States to continue restricting sales of cutting-edge AI chips and chipmaking equipment to China to preserve the U.S. advantage. He also predicted that a swarm of AI “agents” could be capable of taking over the internet within six to 12 months unless researchers agree to slow development, and said global coordination would require cooperation with China.
“Fearmongering, confrontation and vicious competition will only disrupt the process of global AI governance which serves no one’s interest,” Foreign Ministry spokesperson Guo Jiakun said at a regular press conference Monday.
Trump on Sunday downplayed calls for his administration to intervene to slow AI development, saying the United States was ahead of China and that “whoever wins AI, wins.” Chinese companies have developed powerful models that are often less expensive to use than advanced models from U.S.-based companies and, by some measures, are similarly capable. Xi has called for a global AI governance framework involving the Global South and has presented China as a leader in building an open-source AI community. The head of China’s Ministry of State Security has separately called for faster establishment of a system to prevent and manage AI security risks.
The dispute follows a joint cybersecurity advisory issued the previous week by the FBI, National Security Agency and Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency. The agencies alleged that Chinese AI developers had used “aggressive, malicious” efforts to extract, or “distill,” capabilities from advanced U.S. models including Anthropic’s Claude and OpenAI’s GPT. China’s Commerce Ministry dismissed those allegations as groundless, said distillation was commonly used by AI companies and accused the United States of pursuing a monopoly over the AI industry.
China’s state-run Global Times newspaper also dismissed Amodei’s proposal in an editorial Sunday, describing it as a veiled effort to contain China and a “Cold War playbook” for AI. Lizzi C. Lee, a fellow at the Asia Society Policy Institute’s Center for China Analysis, said both countries want to prevent the other from establishing a technological chokepoint. She said Beijing consequently faces a central question about what cooperation on frontier AI safety would mean while Washington also restricts China’s access to frontier computing resources.