HONG KONG — Urgent calls for a slowdown in the development of artificial intelligence may cite a grave threat to humanity, but China says the warnings are instead aimed at slowing its progress as America’s rival superpower.
Beijing on Monday dismissed the intervention from U.S. tech leaders as “fearmongering” and part of a “Cold War playbook.”
It’s the latest sign that competition between the two countries could outweigh mounting safety concerns, after President Donald Trump also rebuffed the warnings from industry leaders and said his focus was on beating China on AI.
The comments followed a lengthy essay that was published Saturday by Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei and endorsed by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and SpaceX founder Elon Musk.
Amodei said that companies should deliberately “slow the pace” at which they improve their models given the potential risks. He also said that a “Chinese lead in AI would pose grave danger for the United States and the world,” and called for the U.S. to restrict sales of key tech to China.
That message was not welcomed by Beijing.
“Fearmongering, confrontation and malicious competition will only disrupt the process of global AI governance and serve no one’s interests,” China’s foreign ministry spokesperson Guo Jiakun told reporters at a regular news briefing on Monday.
The state-run Global Times newspaper had a more blunt tone on Sunday, blasting the call for an industry-wide slowdown as “packed with containment provisions targeting China and is, in essence, a ‘Cold War playbook’ for the AI sector.”
AI has advanced at a breakneck speed, with models rapidly getting smarter, faster and cheaper. They have also frequently outpaced technical safeguards, fueling security fears.
Those fears have now reached a crescendo, but also exposed just how far apart Beijing and Washington seem to be on cooperating to address them.
Amodei himself likened the situation to the Cold War arms race, telling CBS’ ‘Sunday Morning’ that the two sides should work together, but that he didn’t hold out much hope.
Altman, the head of OpenAI, similarly said on X late Sunday that “where we will need the help of our government is for international coordination.”
But that might not be compatible with Trump’s approach.
“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,” the president told reporters Sunday. He criticized “very negative forces” for bringing up things “that won’t happen.”
While Trump rebuffs safety concerns, Beijing has acknowledged AI security risks.
State security minister Chen Yixin said Sunday that China must “accelerate the establishment of a system for preventing and controlling AI security risks.” Chen also said in the state-run China Cyberspace magazine that “we must engage extensively in international cooperation,” identifying AI as “a new track for strategic rivalry.”
The difference in approach on tackling AI progress is likely to be a central issue when Xi and Trump meet on Sept. 24 in Washington.
Amodei’s essay came just a few days after U.S. agencies published an alert saying that top China AI companies have systematically copied cutting-edge AI models from American companies.
Beijing rejected this accusation its companies had been “distilling” U.S. models.
China has also rejected any outside take on how its companies should pace development.
“They want to write the rules. I don’t think they want to follow anybody else’s,” Ja Ian Chong, an associate professor of political science at the National University of Singapore and a nonresident scholar at Carnegie China, told NBC News in a phone interview.
“There’s the sort of talk of cooperation, but the behavior suggests otherwise, and underlying that behavior, I think, is this deep mutual suspicion,” Chong said.
Chinese companies now offer advanced AI performance at a fraction of the cost of U.S. models, with President Xi Jinping pitching China as a pioneer of open-source models in contrast to those produced by most leading American companies.
At the BRICS summit in India on Sunday, he offered member nations help to develop open-source AI. Xi has also outlined a potential global governance framework on AI among the Global South.
Chong said the distillation clash highlighted the suspicion toward China in both the White House and Silicon Valley.
“It’s a bit like an arms race. And to get de-escalation there needs to be simultaneous neutral self restraint and it’s difficult to see how that would come about in this kind of environment,” said Chong.
But not everyone is so pessimistic.
While a U.S.-China agreement on curbing AI progress may be a long shot, the countries could separately pursue greater regulation, said Theo Bertram, director of the London-based Social Market Foundation.
“The idea that we could see the domestic introduction of some safeguards in both countries is not impossible,” Bertram said in a phone interview.
“You do it domestically and it’s in everyone’s interest to learn and share and for there to be accountability,” he said. “Some greater accountability is one way of trying to mitigate what is inevitably going to be a growing political and public demand globally.”
