China hits back at Anthropic CEO's AI slowdown call

You'd expect an essay warning about China's AI ambitions to draw a response from Beijing, and it did, fast. China's Ministry of Foreign Affairs pushed back Monday on Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei's call for continued U.S. restrictions on advanced chip sales to China, days ahead of a planned Trump-Xi meeting where AI governance is expected on the agenda.

In a lengthy essay published Saturday, Amodei warned that a "Chinese lead in AI would pose grave danger for the United States and the world" and pressed Washington to keep limiting exports of cutting-edge AI chips and chipmaking equipment.

He also predicted AI agents could take over parts of the internet within six to 12 months unless researchers agree to slow development, an outcome he said would still require cooperation with China.

As Spokesman Guo Jiakun stated at a press conference, "Fearmongering, confrontation and vicious competition will only disrupt the process of global AI governance, which serves no one's interest."

The Global Times, an official Chinese publication, went even further with its interpretation in its Sunday editorial, where it dubbed the essay a disguised containment policy and called it a Cold War playbook for AI governance.

On his part, President Trump had a different interpretation of the essay when he commented on Sunday that the United States is ahead of China on AI and that "whoever wins AI, wins."

This, in some way, makes him different from Amodei's call for collaborative restraint as both prepare for their meeting on AI governance on September 24.

The debate rests on an ongoing conflict: US government agencies have just accused Chinese AI firms of aggressively "distilling" abilities from models such as Claude and GPT, an allegation that was rejected as baseless by the Chinese Commerce Ministry. As Lizzi C.

Lee of the Asia Society Policy Institute explained it: the essence of the matter is this, Beijing perceives an irony in Washington demanding collaboration while limiting the necessary compute access to make that possible.