Chinese political leaders and commentators aligned with China’s government hit back at calls from U.S. artificial intelligence executives for companies to agree to slow down the development of the technology, complicating the prospects of such a pact being implemented.
On Monday, a spokesperson for Beijing’s Foreign Ministry accused the American executives of spreading “threat narratives and engaging in confrontation and malicious competition.”
Over the weekend, leaders from three top U.S. AI companies endorsed working together to “pace” the development of new AI technology, out of concern that the industry’s ability to control cutting-edge AI is not keeping up with the tech’s capabilities.
Dario Amodei, CEO of Claude chatbot maker Anthropic, in a Saturday proposal for a slowdown criticized China as an authoritarian country that could misuse AI but also called on the United States to try to work with its rival to establish international limits on AI.
The proposal has been met with skepticism in China. In addition to the Foreign Ministry’s fiery statement Monday, commentary in state-run and nationalist Chinese media echoed the view that talk of a slowdown was part of a wider American effort to harm China’s AI industry.
U.S. advocates of controls on AI hope that the issue could be on the agenda when President Donald Trump meets Chinese leader Xi Jinping in Washington on Sept. 24. But with Chinese skepticism of the proposals and Trump dismissing the idea of a slowdown himself Monday, any strict international agreement limiting AI progress seems unlikely.
As AI technology has advanced rapidly over the past several years, Chinese researchers and tech companies have followed closely behind the U.S. in developing new capabilities. China’s government has made AI development a major priority.
Chinese AI models consistently score just behind the latest U.S. models on industry benchmarks, and leading AI companies in China often release free versions of their technology that anyone can use or modify.
Leaders from both China and the U.S. see AI as a key economic and military force that cannot be ceded to their geopolitical rivals. The Biden and Trump administrations have attempted to limit Chinese AI development by imposing export controls on key computer chips and software needed to develop and deploy powerful AI models. China has responded by developing its own chips and working to make its AI algorithms more efficient.
Some Chinese pushback on the proposals for an AI slowdown referenced U.S. trade restrictions on China.
The nationalist tabloid Global Times published commentary Monday accusing Amodei’s AI safety proposal of being part of “a Cold War playbook” and “silent AI Cold War” aimed at containing China.
The commentary called the push from U.S. industry leaders to limit AI development “hypocritical and shortsighted,” saying the real goal is to use technological barriers and control over the proposed rules to curb China’s AI development, preserve U.S. dominance in frontier technology and exclude China from global AI governance.
China’s minister of state security, Chen Yixin, referenced the export controls in an article published over the weekend by China Cyberspace, a journal run by Beijing’s internet watchdog body, the Cyberspace Administration of China.
“Certain countries are leveraging their accumulated advantages in AI … and, in the name of ‘safeguarding national security,’ are severely restricting other countries from accessing cutting-edge technologies,” he wrote. “AI has become the main battleground in global technological competition and a new arena for strategic rivalry among major powers.”
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