China's Ministry of Foreign Affairs has pushed back against calls by the head of US artificial intelligence company Anthropic for Washington to curb China's AI capabilities, as debate over global AI governance intensifies ahead of a planned summit between US President Donald Trump and Chinese leader Xi Jinping.
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei published a lengthy essay on Saturday warning that "a Chinese lead in AI would pose grave danger for the United States and the world." He called for maintaining restrictions on sales of advanced AI chips and chipmaking equipment to China in order to preserve the United States' technological edge.
China's Ministry of Foreign Affairs responded at a regular press conference on Monday. Spokesperson Guo Jiakun said all parties should work together on AI governance. "Fearmongering, confrontation and vicious competition will only disrupt the process of global AI governance which serves no one's interest," he said.
On Sunday, President Trump downplayed calls for his administration to slow AI development, saying the United States was leading China and that "whoever wins AI, wins."
Amodei also warned in his essay that a swarm of AI agents could take over the internet within six to twelve months unless researchers agree to slow development. He said that "global pacing will require cooperation with China, the autocratic country with by far the most advanced AI capabilities."
Trump and Xi are expected to discuss AI governance, among other topics, at a meeting planned for September 24.
Chinese companies have developed powerful AI models that are often cheaper to use than advanced US-based alternatives and, by some measures, equally capable. Chinese President Xi has called for the establishment of a global AI governance framework among Global South nations, while positioning China as a pioneer in open-source AI development. The head of China's Ministry of State Security has also called for accelerating the creation of a system to prevent and manage AI security risks.
China's state-run Global Times dismissed Amodei's essay in an editorial published Sunday, calling it a veiled call to contain China. The publication said the essay may appear focused on global AI safety but is "packed with containment provisions targeting China and is, in essence, a 'Cold War playbook' for the AI sector."
Amodei's essay was published days after the FBI, the National Security Agency, and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency issued a joint advisory accusing Chinese AI developers of engaging in "aggressive, malicious" efforts to extract capabilities from advanced US AI models, including Anthropic's Claude and OpenAI's GPT.
China's Commerce Ministry dismissed those claims as groundless, saying the technique in question — known as distillation — is commonly used across the AI industry. It also accused the United States of pursuing a "monopoly of the AI industry."
An analyst at the Asia Society Policy Institute's Center for China Analysis said both countries are trying to prevent the other from establishing a technological chokepoint. "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?" said Lizzi C. Lee, a fellow at the institute.
