China’s foreign ministry on Monday responded to a call from Anthropic’s boss for the US to limit China’s artificial intelligence capabilities, as he argued for a global slowdown in AI development.
US President Donald Trump and Chinese leader Xi Jinping are expected to discuss AI governance, among other things, at a meeting scheduled for September 24th.
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei warned in a lengthy essay published Saturday that “Chinese leadership in AI would pose a grave danger to the United States and the world.” He called for continued restrictions on sales of cutting-edge AI chips and chip-making equipment to China to maintain the U.S.’s AI lead.
China’s Foreign Ministry responded to a question about Amodei’s essay by saying that all parties should cooperate on AI.
“Fear-mongering, confrontation and fierce competition will only disrupt the global process.” AI governance This serves no one,” spokesman Guo Jiakun said at a regular news conference on Monday.
On Sunday, President Donald Trump downplayed calls for his administration to intervene to slow AI development, saying that the U.S. is leading China on AI and that “whoever wins AI wins.”
Amodei also predicted that a swarm of AI “agents” could take over the Internet in six to 12 months unless researchers agree on a slowdown. He said that “global dynamics will require collaboration with China, the autocratic country with by far the most advanced AI capabilities.”
Trump and Xi could discuss AI governance at the summit
US President Donald Trump is expected to discuss issues such as AI governance with Chinese leader Xi Jinping’s meeting scheduled for late September.
Chinese companies have developed powerful AI models that are often cheaper to use than the advanced models developed by U.S. companies, although in some ways they are just as powerful.
China’s President Xi has called for the establishment of a global AI governance framework in the Global South and described China as a pioneer in building an open source AI community.
The head of China’s Ministry of State Security also called for “accelerating the construction of a system to prevent and manage AI security risks” in a recent article.
Beijing accuses the US of holding it back
In an editorial published on Sunday, China’s state-run Global Times newspaper dismissed Amodei’s essay as a veiled call to “contain” China. It says that while on the surface Amodei’s essay appears to be focused on global AI security, it is “full of containment provisions against China and is essentially a ‘Cold War lexicon’ for the AI sector.”
Amodei’s essay was published days after the FBI, the National Security Agency and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency released a joint cybersecurity alert last week that said Chinese AI developers had made “aggressive, malicious” efforts to extract or “distill” capabilities from some of the most advanced AI models in the US, such as Anthropic’s Claude and OpenAI’s GPT.
China’s Commerce Ministry dismissed the U.S. claims as baseless, saying “distillation” is widely used by many AI companies. It also said that the US was seeking a “monopoly of the AI industry”.
Both China and the U.S. want to “ensure that the other side cannot create a technical bottleneck over itself,” said Lizzi C. Lee, a fellow at the Asia Society Policy Institute’s Center for China Analysis.
“So from Beijing’s perspective, an obvious question arises: If the US wants China to cooperate on border security while restricting its access to border computing, then exactly what does that cooperation look like?” Lee said.
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Related: Trump administration vows to crack down on Chinese companies that “exploit” US-made AI models.
