China has criticized warnings from several US tech executives about dangerous artificial-intelligence development and a potential Chinese technological lead over the United States.
Foreign-ministry spokesperson Guo Jiakun said in Beijing that spreading "threat narratives" and fostering confrontation and malicious competition disrupted the process of global AI governance and was not in either side's interest. All parties should jointly work toward open AI development, he said.
Over the weekend, renewed calls from US AI-tech leaders to slow the pace of development sparked controversy. Dario Amodei, chief executive of Anthropic, led the appeal, receiving support from rivals including OpenAI's Sam Altman and tech billionaire Elon Musk.
Following recent hacking attacks, Amodei wrote Saturday that he was concerned an AI swarm could take over the entire internet within six to twelve months, potentially causing hundreds of billions of dollars in damage. He also warned of a national-security threat if projects linked to the Chinese Communist Party gained the upper hand.
China is advancing an ambitious AI-development plan. Over the weekend at the BRICS summit in New Delhi, President Xi Jinping proposed that the group, viewed as a counterweight to the West, swiftly reach common AI regulations at the state level.
US firms remain the technology leaders in AI, but observers note Chinese companies are closing the gap quickly. A long-running rivalry between the world's two largest economies over AI supremacy has been building for some time.
China's state-owned Global Times newspaper described Amodei's proposal as an attempt to constrain China. "The article is packed with measures to contain China and amounts, in effect, to a Cold War strategy handbook for the AI sector," it said.
