Beijing Rebukes Anthropic CEO's Call to Curb China's AI Rise

China's foreign ministry on Monday rejected a call by the head of the U.S. artificial intelligence company Anthropic to restrain China's AI development, arguing that confrontation over the technology would harm everyone.

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei made the appeal in a lengthy essay published on Saturday, warning that a "Chinese lead in AI would pose grave danger for the United States and the world." He urged continued restrictions on exports of advanced AI chips and chipmaking equipment to China as a way of preserving the U.S. edge in the field.

Asked about the essay at a regular press conference in Beijing, foreign ministry spokesperson Guo Jiakun said all sides 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," he said.

Amodei also predicted that a swarm of AI "agents" could take over the internet within six to 12 months unless researchers agree to slow down, and said any global pacing effort would require cooperation with China, which he described as the autocratic country with by far the most advanced AI capabilities.

The exchange comes as U.S. President Donald Trump and Chinese leader Xi Jinping are expected to discuss AI governance, among other topics, at a meeting planned for Sept. 24. On Sunday, Trump played down calls for his administration to slow AI development, saying the United States was leading China and that "whoever wins AI, wins."

Chinese companies have built powerful AI models that are often cheaper to use than advanced U.S. models, even as by some measures they are just as capable. Xi has called for a global AI governance framework among Global South countries while pitching China as a pioneer of an open-source AI community. The head of China's Ministry of State Security has separately called for "accelerating the establishment of a system for preventing and managing AI security risks."

In an editorial on Sunday, the state-run Global Times dismissed Amodei's essay as a veiled call to "contain" China. It said the piece may appear focused on global AI security but is "packed with containment provisions targeting China and is, in essence, a 'Cold War playbook' for the AI sector."

Amodei's essay followed a joint cybersecurity advisory last week from the FBI, the National Security Agency and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, which said Chinese AI developers had engaged in "aggressive, malicious" efforts to extract, or "distill," capabilities from leading U.S. models such as Anthropic's Claude and OpenAI's GPT. China's Commerce Ministry rejected the claims as groundless, saying distillation is commonly used by many AI companies and accusing Washington of pursuing a "monopoly of the AI industry."

Lizzi C. Lee, a fellow at the Asia Society Policy Institute's Center for China Analysis, said both countries want to ensure the other cannot establish a technology chokepoint over them. "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?" she said.