Beijing Rebukes Anthropic CEO’s Call to Curb China AI
China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs on Monday pushed back against a call by Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei for the United States to curb China’s artificial intelligence development, saying that “fearmongering, confrontation and vicious competition” would only disrupt global AI governance. The exchange, reported by NPR, marks the latest flashpoint in an intensifying US-China contest over AI leadership and comes just days before a planned meeting between President Donald Trump and President Xi Jinping, expected to touch on AI governance.
Speaking at a regular press conference in Beijing, ministry spokesperson Guo Jiakun rejected Amodei’s framing, saying 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,” Guo said.
The Essay That Sparked the Dispute
Amodei, who leads one of the world’s most prominent AI developers, published a lengthy essay titled “We Must Pace the Frontier” on Saturday. In it, he argued that a “Chinese lead in AI would pose grave danger for the United States and the world,” and called for continued restrictions on sales of cutting-edge AI chips and chipmaking equipment to China.
Amodei framed the proposal as a matter of safety rather than pure competition, warning that a swarm of AI “agents” could take over the internet within six to twelve months unless researchers slow the pace of development. He also acknowledged that “global pacing will require cooperation with China, the autocratic country with by far the most advanced AI capabilities.”
In his essay, Amodei wrote that if the measures he proposed were executed well, “they would slow China’s progress enough to widen America’s lead significantly over the next 3-5 years — the window when AI becomes geopolitically most important.”
Washington’s Mixed Signals
Amodei’s appeal drew a divided response in Washington. President Trump, speaking to reporters at his Doonbeg golf resort in Ireland on Sunday, downplayed calls to slow AI development, saying the United States was already ahead. “We’re leading China in AI, we’re the most sophisticated country in the world, and frankly, I want to keep it that way because whoever wins AI, wins,” Trump said, according to NPR.
He sharpened that message on Monday in a post on Truth Social, writing that “the only control or ‘guardrails’ that AI needs is a STRONG AND SMART (High IQ!) PRESIDENT” and warning of a “sick conspiracy” against AI and data centers.
House Speaker Mike Johnson, appearing on CNN’s State of the Union on Sunday, also opposed regulatory action. “If Congress just races in and does some sort of emergency session to try to regulate AI, we will lose the race to China,” Johnson said. “And that is a threat to every single American.”
Not everyone in the US tech world endorsed Amodei’s framing. David Sacks, co-chair of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, responded critically to the warnings, telling tech leaders to “stop pretending the motivation to slow down is purely altruistic” and pointing to product-liability exposure.
A Deeper Dispute Over ‘Distillation’
The exchange unfolded against a separate but related confrontation. Amodei’s essay was published days after the FBI, NSA and CISA issued a joint advisory accusing Chinese AI developers of “aggressive, malicious” efforts to extract, or “distill,” capabilities from advanced US models, including Anthropic’s Claude and OpenAI’s GPT.
According to Asia Times, the advisory named six Chinese firms — DeepSeek, Moonshot AI, Alibaba, MiniMax, StepFun and Z.AI — accusing them of extracting billions of tokens through fraudulent accounts and proxy services since late 2024. It also urged US firms to consider feeding suspected distillations degraded or “poisoned” responses without informing the users.
China’s Ministry of Commerce rejected the allegations as “groundless in fact and without basis in law,” according to a statement reported by the Global Times. A ministry spokesperson said distillation is “a normal technical and commercial practice in the industry” used worldwide, including by US companies, and accused Washington of “double standards” and of pursuing “technological hegemony in AI.”
The ministry warned that if the United States suppressed Chinese AI companies under the pretext of countering distillation, “China will resolutely take countermeasures.” It also confirmed that the two heads of state had agreed to launch an intergovernmental dialogue on AI.
Analysis: Safety, Competition and Motive
The dispute exposes a tension at the heart of the AI debate: the line between safety advocacy and commercial strategy. Chinese analysts and some Western commentators have suggested that Amodei’s safety framing doubles as a competitive maneuver.
Writing in the Global Times, Xiang Ligang, a veteran telecom and tech policy observer, described Amodei’s argument as “biased and contradictory.” On one hand, Xiang noted, Amodei acknowledges that pacing AI development would require cooperation with China; on the other, he advocates restrictions on chips and computing power to slow China’s progress while widening the US lead.
Liu Shaoshan, director of embodied AI at the Shenzhen Institute of Artificial Intelligence and Robotics for Society and a former colleague of Amodei, argued that once AI is portrayed as determining national competition and the future of civilization, “an AI company is no longer seen as an ordinary tech company, but as ‘strategic infrastructure.’” He said this dynamic “directly increases its policy importance, raises industry barriers, and boosts its valuation.”
Xiao Qian, vice dean of the Institute for AI International Governance at Tsinghua University, told the Global Times that Anthropic faces growing competition from rapidly advancing Chinese open-source models, which challenge the closed-source approach in cost, performance and global developer adoption. In that reading, Amodei’s push to restrict Chinese access to advanced US models serves to protect Anthropic’s competitive position.
The skepticism is not confined to China. The BBC reported that some observers suggested Amodei’s post was “less about safety than about consolidating control over AI technology,” while The Atlantic described critics who see it as “an elaborate marketing pitch.” Amid preparations for possible stock market listings that could value Anthropic and OpenAI at hundreds of billions of dollars, questions about motive carry unusual weight.
At the same time, Amodei’s concerns are echoed by figures who have little direct commercial stake. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Elon Musk both publicly agreed with the thrust of his warnings. Still, the depth of China’s reaction reflects how quickly AI has become inseparable from geopolitics.
A Shifting Balance
Beijing has sought to cast itself as a champion of open, cooperative AI development. China hosted the 2026 World AI Conference and a High-Level Meeting on Global AI Governance, and Xi has called for a global governance framework among the Global South. According to the Global Times, China’s open-source large models have recorded more than 10 billion cumulative downloads, and Hugging Face CEO Clément Delangue has said China is winning the AI race with open-weight models.
Lizzi C. Lee, a fellow at the Asia Society Policy Institute’s Center for China Analysis, framed the core dilemma bluntly for NPR: “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?”
What’s Next
The immediate focus is the planned Trump-Xi meeting on September 24, where AI governance is expected to be on the agenda alongside broader trade and security issues. Whether that encounter yields a genuine dialogue on frontier safety — or merely a continuation of the current standoff — may set the tone for US-China relations in the AI era.
For now, both sides appear to be positioning ahead of the talks. Amodei’s proposal has given Washington a rationale for maintaining its technological lead; Beijing’s response signals it will not accept being cast as the junior partner in a technology it views as central to its future. The question of who governs AI — and who gets to decide the pace — remains, for the moment, unresolved.