China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs has rejected calls by Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei for the United States to restrict China’s artificial intelligence capabilities, warning that confrontation and competition could undermine global efforts to govern the technology.
Amodei, in a lengthy essay published on Saturday, September 12, warned that a “Chinese lead in AI would pose grave danger for the United States and the world.” He called for continued restrictions on the sale of cutting-edge AI chips and chipmaking equipment to China as part of efforts to preserve the United States’ advantage in artificial intelligence. Responding to a question about Amodei’s comments at a regular press conference on Monday, September 14, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Guo Jiakun called for international cooperation on AI governance.
“Fearmongering, confrontation and vicious competition will only disrupt the process of global AI governance which serves no one’s interest,” Guo said. The exchange comes ahead of a planned September 24 meeting between US President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping, where AI governance is expected to be among the issues discussed.
Trump on Sunday played down calls for his administration to intervene to slow the development of artificial intelligence, arguing that the United States was ahead of China in the technology. “Whoever wins AI, wins,” Trump said. Amodei also warned that a swarm of autonomous AI “agents” could potentially take over the internet within six to 12 months unless researchers agreed to slow development.
He argued that any worldwide effort to reduce the pace of AI development would require Beijing’s involvement, writing that “global pacing will require cooperation with China, the autocratic country with by far the most advanced AI capabilities.” Chinese companies have developed increasingly powerful AI models, some of which are cheaper to use than advanced systems developed by US companies while performing at comparable levels by some measures.
Xi has called for the establishment of a global framework for AI governance involving countries in the Global South and has promoted China’s role in developing an open-source AI community. The head of China’s Ministry of State Security has also called for “accelerating the establishment of a system for preventing and managing AI security risks.”
Amodei’s comments came days after the FBI, National Security Agency and Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency issued a joint cybersecurity advisory accusing Chinese AI developers of “aggressive, malicious” efforts to extract or “distill” capabilities from advanced US artificial intelligence models, including Anthropic’s Claude and OpenAI’s GPT.
China’s Commerce Ministry rejected the US allegations as groundless, arguing that distillation is a technique commonly used by AI companies and accusing Washington of pursuing a “monopoly of the AI industry.” China’s state-run Global Times also criticised Amodei’s essay in an editorial published on Sunday, arguing that it amounted to a call to contain China’s technological development.
The newspaper said that although the essay appeared to focus on global AI safety, it was “packed with containment provisions targeting China and is, in essence, a ‘Cold War playbook’ for the AI sector.” Lizzi C. Lee, a fellow at the Asia Society Policy Institute’s Center for China Analysis, said both Washington and Beijing were seeking to prevent the other from gaining decisive technological leverage.
Both countries want “to make sure the other side cannot establish a tech chokepoint over them,” Lee said. “So from Beijing’s perspective, there is an obvious question: if the U.S. wants China to cooperate on frontier safety while also restricting its access to frontier compute, what exactly does that cooperation look like?”