BEIJING — China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs strongly rebuked Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei on Monday for advocating restrictions on Beijing’s artificial intelligence capabilities, a move that underscores growing tensions between the two technological giants ahead of scheduled high-level diplomacy.
The diplomatic clash followed an essay published by Amodei over the weekend, in which he warned that a Chinese dominance in AI would present “grave danger” to the United States and the world. He urged the U.S. government to maintain strict bans on the sale of advanced AI chips and semiconductor manufacturing equipment to China, arguing that global safety requires a coordinated slowdown in AI development.
Guo Jiakun, a spokesperson for China’s Foreign Ministry, dismissed Amodei’s arguments during a regular press briefing. “Fearmongering, confrontation and vicious competition will only disrupt the process of global AI governance which serves no one’s interest,” Guo said, adding that all nations should collaborate rather than compete aggressively on AI regulation.
Amodei’s proposal comes amid heightened geopolitical friction. Earlier this week, U.S. agencies including the FBI, NSA, and Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency issued a joint advisory accusing Chinese developers of conducting “aggressive, malicious” efforts to extract or “distill” capabilities from frontier American models like Anthropic’s Claude and OpenAI’s GPT. China’s Commerce Ministry has rejected these allegations as baseless, characterizing distillation as a standard industry practice and accusing Washington of seeking to monopolize the AI sector.
The editorial board of the Global Times, a state-run newspaper, further criticized Amodei’s essay on Sunday, describing it as a disguised attempt to “contain” China. The publication labeled the plan a “Cold War playbook” for the technology sector, arguing that it prioritized strategic suppression over genuine security.
On the American side, President Donald Trump downplayed the urgency of slowing AI development, asserting that the United States remains ahead of China. “Whoever wins AI, wins,” Trump stated, emphasizing the competitive nature of the field. Meanwhile, Chinese President Xi Jinping has positioned Beijing as a leader in establishing an open-source AI community and has called for a global governance framework involving the Global South.
Amodei also raised alarms about the potential for AI agents to take over the internet within six to 12 months unless researchers agree to pace their work. He noted that any effective global pacing mechanism would require cooperation with China, despite its authoritarian governance structure.
Lizzi C. Lee, a fellow at the Asia Society Policy Institute’s Center for China Analysis, highlighted the contradiction at the heart of the current diplomatic standoff. “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.
The two nations are expected to address AI governance when President Trump meets with President Xi Jinping later this month on September 24.
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