Beijing on Monday pushed back against Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei's appeal for the United States to limit China's artificial intelligence capabilities, dismissing his warnings as an attempt to stifle competition under the guise of safety.
Speaking at a regular press briefing, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Guo Jiakun said that "fearmongering, confrontation and vicious competition will only disrupt the process of global AI governance which serves no one's interest." The response came after Amodei published a lengthy essay over the weekend arguing that a Chinese lead in AI would pose a "grave danger" to the U.S. and the world. He urged Washington to maintain export controls on advanced chips and chipmaking equipment to preserve America's edge.
The exchange signals rising tension ahead of a planned meeting between President Donald Trump and Chinese leader Xi Jinping on September 24, where AI governance is expected to be on the agenda. Trump, however, downplayed the need for immediate intervention, asserting that the U.S. is already ahead of China on AI and that "whoever wins AI, wins."
Amodei also predicted that AI "agents" could soon dominate the internet unless researchers agree to slow development. He argued that any global slowdown would require cooperation with China, which he described as "the autocratic country with by far the most advanced AI capabilities."
Chinese firms have developed powerful AI models that are often cheaper and comparable in capability to those from American tech giants, challenging U.S. dominance. Xi has advocated for a global AI governance framework centered on the Global South and positioned China as a leader in open-source AI development. Meanwhile, China's Minister of State Security recently called for accelerating the creation of a system to prevent and manage AI security risks.
State-run media echoed the government's stance. An editorial in the Global Times on Sunday characterized Amodei's essay as a "Cold War playbook" for the AI sector, packed with containment measures targeting China under the veneer of global security.
The dispute intensified after U.S. intelligence and cybersecurity agencies issued a joint advisory last week accusing Chinese developers of "aggressive, malicious" efforts to "distill" capabilities from advanced American models like Anthropic's Claude and OpenAI's GPT. China's Commerce Ministry rejected the allegations as groundless, arguing that distillation is a common practice in the industry and accusing the U.S. of pursuing a monopoly in AI.
Lizzi C. Lee, a fellow at the Asia Society Policy Institute's Center for China Analysis, noted that both powers are determined to prevent the other from establishing a technological chokepoint. "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?" she said.
The back-and-forth underscores the deep strategic rivalry shaping the future of AI, with both capitals wary of ceding ground in a technology widely seen as pivotal to economic and military power. As Trump and Xi prepare to meet, the challenge will be finding common ground on governance while competing fiercely for supremacy.
