BEIJING: China's Ministry of Foreign Affairs on Monday hit back at a call from the head of Anthropic for the US to curb China's artificial intelligence capabilities, which he issued as he argued for a global slowdown on AI development.
US President Donald Trump and Chinese leader Xi Jinping are expected to discuss AI governance, among other topics, at a meeting planned on September 24.
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, in a lengthy essay published on Saturday, warned that a "Chinese lead in AI would pose grave danger for the United States and the world." He called for continuing restrictions on sales of cutting-edge AI chips and chipmaking equipment to China in order to keep the US' AI edge.
China's Ministry of Foreign Affairs responded to a question about Amodei's essay by saying that 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," spokesperson Guo Jiakun said at a regular press conference on Monday.
On Sunday, Trump downplayed calls for his administration to step in to slow down AI development, saying that the US was leading China on AI and that "whoever wins AI, wins."
Amodei also predicted that a swarm of AI "agents" could be able to take over the internet in six to 12 months unless researchers agree to slow down. He said that "global pacing will require cooperation with China, the autocratic country with by far the most advanced AI capabilities."
Trump and Xi could discuss AI governance at summit
US President Donald Trump is expected to discuss topics including AI governance with Chinese leader Xi Jinping meeting planned for late September.
Chinese companies have developed powerful AI models that are often cheaper to use than advanced models from US-based companies, even as by some measures, they are just as capable.
China's Xi has called for the setting up of a global AI governance framework among Global South, while pitching China as a pioneer in establishing an open-source AI community.
The head of China's Ministry of State Security has also called for "accelerating the establishment of a system for preventing and managing AI security risks" in a recent article.
Beijing accuses US of trying to hold it back
In an editorial published Sunday, China's state-run Global Times newspaper dismissed Amodei's essay as a veiled call to "contain" China. It said that Amodei's essay may appear on the surface to be focused on global AI security, but, that it is "packed with containment provisions targeting China and is, in essence, a 'Cold War playbook' for the AI sector."
Amodei's essay was published a few days after the FBI, National Security Agency and Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency issued a joint cybersecurity advisory last week, saying Chinese AI developers had engaged in "aggressive, malicious" efforts in extracting, or "distilling," capabilities from some of the most advanced AI models in the US like Anthropic's Claude and OpenAI's GPT.
China's Commerce Ministry dismissed the US claims as groundless and said "distillation" has been commonly used by many AI companies. It also said that the US was pursuing a "monopoly of the AI industry."
Both China and the US want "to make sure the other side cannot establish a tech chokepoint over them," said Lizzi C. Lee, a fellow at the Asia Society Policy Institute's Center for China Analysis.
"So from Beijing's perspective, there is an obvious question: if the US wants China to cooperate on frontier safety while also restricting its access to frontier compute, what exactly does that cooperation look like?" Lee said.