China's Ministry of Foreign Affairs on September 14 dismissed Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei's call for the United States to restrict China's artificial intelligence development as "fearmongering" that undermines global AI governance. The exchange comes days before President Donald Trump and Chinese leader Xi Jinping are scheduled to meet on September 24, where AI governance is expected to be on the agenda.
In a lengthy essay published September 12, Amodei warned that a "Chinese lead in AI would pose grave danger for the United States and the world" and argued for maintaining restrictions on sales of the most advanced AI chips and chipmaking equipment to China. He also predicted that swarms of AI agents could take over the internet within six to 12 months unless researchers agree to slow development globally. The same day as Beijing's response, Trump pushed back against calls for his administration to slow AI development, calling such efforts part of a "SICK conspiracy" that could let China eclipse the U.S. on AI.
Confirmed
- China's Foreign Ministry spokesperson Guo Jiakun said at a September 14 press conference that "fearmongering, confrontation and vicious competition will only disrupt the process of global AI governance — which serves no one's interest."
- Amodei's essay calls for continued U.S. export controls on advanced AI chips to China and argues that global pacing "will require cooperation with China, the autocratic country with by far the most advanced AI capabilities."
- Trump rejected slowdown pressure the same day, describing it as part of a "SICK conspiracy" that could allow China to eclipse the U.S. on AI.
- Trump and Xi are expected to discuss AI governance at a summit planned for September 24.
- Chinese companies have developed powerful AI models that are often cheaper than U.S. counterparts and, by some measures, comparable in capability.
- The FBI, NSA, and CISA issued a joint cybersecurity advisory in the days before Amodei's essay, accusing Chinese AI developers of "aggressive, malicious" efforts to extract capabilities from advanced U.S. models like Claude and GPT through distillation.
- China's Commerce Ministry dismissed the U.S. claims as groundless, stating distillation is commonly used by many AI companies and accusing the U.S. of pursuing an "AI industry monopoly."
- Chen Yixin, head of China's Ministry of State Security, published an essay on September 13 warning that AI in the hands of "hostile forces" could threaten China's "political, institutional, and ideological security" and critical information infrastructure.
Unknown
- Whether the September 24 Trump-Xi meeting will produce any concrete AI governance framework or joint statement.
- Specific technical evidence behind the U.S. agencies' distillation allegations against Chinese AI developers.
- Whether Amodei's predicted six-to-12-month timeline for AI agents taking over the internet is based on internal Anthropic research or broader expert consensus.
- How China's open-source AI community initiative, referenced by Xi, will interact with U.S. export controls on compute.
Our take
The statements reveal a deepening trust deficit: each side frames the other's AI advances as an existential threat while demanding cooperation on its own terms. Amodei's chip-restriction push paired with global pacing — a thread he also sketched in his earlier three-step slowdown plan — hands Beijing an easy rebuttal: safety "cooperation" that keeps China compute-starved looks like containment. September 24 will test whether either side can turn that rhetoric into a checkable mechanism.
