China on Monday rebuffed calls from U.S. AI executives urging a slowdown in frontier artificial intelligence development, branding the proposals as "fear mongering" that would undermine global governance efforts.
Guo Jiakun, a spokesperson for China's Foreign Ministry, said the rhetoric of "confrontation and competition" would disrupt the process of establishing international AI oversight. He was responding to a Saturday essay by Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, alongside OpenAI's Sam Altman and Elon Musk, arguing the industry should decelerate because of risks posed by rapid technological progress.
The day before, China's Minister of State Security, Chen Yixin, published an article calling for the accelerated construction of an AI security risk prevention and control system. The AI field has become "the main battleground for global technological competition and a new arena for strategic rivalry among major powers," Chen wrote, adding there was a need for "healthy and orderly" development of the technology.
The diplomatic spat came amid a rout in AI-related equities. SoftBank, one of OpenAI's largest investors, fell 10% in Japan trading. Amodei acknowledged in his essay that pacing would be constrained by the lead U.S. firms hold over "authoritarian regimes, chiefly the Chinese Communist Party." "If we slow down by more than this amount, then (unpaced) CCP-associated projects will pull ahead, creating significant national security risk," he wrote.
U.S. President Donald Trump rejected the CEOs' calls during a trip to Ireland, warning against ceding strategic advantage. "We're leading China in AI... and, frankly I want to keep it that way because whoever wins AI, wins," Trump said.
Meanwhile, President Xi Jinping told the BRICS bloc summit in New Delhi over the weekend that China would take the lead in fostering AI collaboration and development among developing countries. Adoption of Chinese AI models is also gaining traction among Western companies as capabilities have improved.
Helen Toner, executive director of the Georgetown Center for Security and Emerging Technology and a former OpenAI board member, said the best estimates place China's top models roughly six to nine months behind the U.S. frontier. "If that means that we slow down and they just rip past us because they're pretty close behind — that's a problem," Toner said. She added it was unclear how much of China's progress is fast-following versus independent, noting that if U.S. frontier development slows, China may slow somewhat as well.
