China bristles at Anthropic CEO’s 'fearmongering' about its AI development

BEIJING (AP) — China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs on Monday bristled at the Anthropic CEO’s call for the U.S. to curb China’s artificial intelligence capabilities as part of a wider argument for a global slowdown on AI development.

In a lengthy essay published Saturday, Dario Amodei warned that a “Chinese lead in AI would pose grave danger for the United States and the world.” To enable the U.S. to keep its technological edge, Amodei called for maintaining restrictions on sales to China of the most advanced AI chips and chipmaking equipment.

A spokesperson for China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs said Amodei’s dire warnings about China were counterproductive and that all parties should work together on AI.

“Fearmongering, confrontation and vicious competition will only disrupt the process of global AI governance — which serves no one’s interest,” spokesperson Guo Jiakun said at a press conference in response to a question about Amodei’s essay.

For their part, Chinese leaders have also sounded the alarm about AI, warning of the risks posed by foreign entities with advanced capabilities. A top security official in China’s government published an essay on Sunday in which he accused “certain nations” — a reference to the U.S. — of leveraging AI advantages to hinder other countries’ innovation.

On Monday, President Donald Trump pushed back against calls for his administration to step in to slow down AI development, saying such efforts were part of a “SICK conspiracy” which could allow China to eclipse the U.S. on AI.

Trump and Xi could discuss AI governance at summit

Trump and Chinese leader Xi Jinping are expected to discuss AI governance, among other topics, at a meeting planned on Sept. 24.

Chinese companies have developed powerful AI models that are often cheaper to use than advanced models from U.S.-based companies; by some measures, they are just as capable.

Among the concerns outlined in his essay, Amodei predicted that a swarm of AI “agents” could be able to take over the internet in six to 12 months unless researchers agree to slow down. He said that “global pacing will require cooperation with China, the autocratic country with by far the most advanced AI capabilities.”

Xi has called for the setting up of a global AI governance framework among the Global South, while pitching China as a pioneer in establishing an open-source AI community.

Beijing accuses US of trying to hold it back

In an editorial published Sunday, China’s state-run Global Times newspaper dismissed Amodei’s essay as a veiled call to “contain” China. It said that Amodei’s essay may appear on the surface to be focused on global AI security, but, that it is “packed with containment provisions targeting China and is, in essence, a ‘Cold War playbook’ for the AI sector.”

Amodei’s essay was published a few days after the FBI, National Security Agency and Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency issued a joint cybersecurity advisory last week. That advisory said Chinese AI developers had engaged in “aggressive, malicious” efforts in extracting, or “distilling,” capabilities from some of the most advanced AI models in the U.S. like Anthropic’s Claude and OpenAI’s GPT.

China’s Commerce Ministry dismissed the U.S. claims as groundless and said “distillation” has been commonly used by many AI companies. It also said that the U.S. was pursuing a “monopoly of the AI industry.”

Both China and the U.S. want “to make sure the other side cannot establish a tech chokepoint over them,” said Lizzi C. Lee, a fellow at the Asia Society Policy Institute’s Center for China Analysis.

“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?” Lee said.

China has worries about AI in the hands of ‘hostile forces’

In an essay posted Sunday on social media, Chen Yixin, head of China’s Ministry of State Security, warned that, in the hands of “hostile forces and individuals with ulterior motives,” this technology could pose a direct threat to “our political, institutional, and ideological security.”

Citing the capabilities of powerful technologies from U.S. companies like Anthropic and OpenAI, Chen warned that “certain nations and organizations” now have the capabilities to “rapidly discover vulnerabilities at scale … and execute complex hacking tasks.” That, he wrote, poses “serious risks to my country’s critical information infrastructure.”

Foreign spying agencies are turning to AI to “aggressively harvest sensitive data, including critical national data, trade secrets, and citizens’ personal privacy information,” Chen wrote.

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Chan reported from Hong Kong. Associated Press writer Didi Tang in Washington contributed to this report.

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