China's Foreign Ministry calls Amodei essay 'fearmongering'
TL;DR
- China deployed a coordinated four-ministry rejection on Sept. 14, framing Amodei's safety argument as a U.S. containment strategy against Chinese AI.
- Global Times ran a 'Cold War playbook' editorial on Sept. 13, one day before the Foreign Ministry issued its formal rebuttal.
- Trump invoked criminal and regulatory power against AI firms opposing rapid buildout, making the pacing debate a direct domestic liability for frontier lab CEOs.
China's Foreign Ministry took public aim at Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei on Monday, using a regular press conference to answer a Saturday essay in which Amodei argued the United States must keep restricting sales of cutting-edge AI chips and chipmaking equipment to China. "Fearmongering, confrontation and vicious competition will only disrupt the process of global AI governance which serves no one's interest," spokesperson Guo Jiakun said, according to reporting from NPR.
Amodei's essay warned that a "Chinese lead in AI would pose grave danger for the United States and the world," and predicted a swarm of AI "agents" could take over the internet in six to 12 months unless researchers agree to slow down. He also wrote that "global pacing will require cooperation with China, the autocratic country with by far the most advanced AI capabilities." State-run Global Times went further in a Sunday editorial, calling the essay "packed with containment provisions targeting China and is, in essence, a 'Cold War playbook' for the AI sector."
The exchange lands ahead of a planned Sept. 24 meeting where Trump and Xi Jinping are expected to discuss AI governance. On Sunday, Trump himself downplayed pacing calls, telling reporters the U.S. was leading China on AI and that "whoever wins AI, wins." Amodei's essay came a few days after the FBI, National Security Agency and Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency issued a joint advisory accusing Chinese AI developers of "aggressive, malicious" efforts to distill capabilities from Anthropic's Claude and OpenAI's GPT. China's Commerce Ministry dismissed the claim as groundless, said distillation is standard practice, and accused Washington of pursuing a "monopoly of the AI industry."
Lizzi C. Lee, a fellow at the Asia Society Policy Institute's Center for China Analysis, framed the resulting bind: "if the U.S. wants China to cooperate on frontier safety while also restricting its access to frontier compute, what exactly does that cooperation look like?"
Markets read the same essay differently earlier in the day; our tracker logged an Asian AI stocks slump pinned to the same pacing calls Beijing is now branding fearmongering.
What others are reporting
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Bloomberg Read →
Bloomberg frames China's rejection as a geopolitical counter-move, contextualizing it within U.S.-China tech competition and the upcoming Trump-Xi bilateral.
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The New York Times Read →
Captures Trump and Huang's live public performance, showing the White House secured a top hardware CEO as a named co-signer against the pacing call the same day Beijing responded.
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Yahoo Finance Read →
Surfaces Trump's explicit regulatory threat and names NVIDIA, Broadcom, and Vertiv as political beneficiaries of rapid buildout, adding a market-impact layer to the political clash.
The only control or 'guardrails' that AI needs is a STRONG AND SMART (High IQ!) PRESIDENT
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Nikkei Asia Read →
Quantifies the capital cost of the pacing dispute across Asian markets, with OpenAI's IPO postponement on safety grounds compounding the selloff beyond the Amodei essay alone.
AI safety concerns push tech stocks lower in Asia; oil spike also weakens sentiment
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Unite.AI Read →
Names six Chinese AI companies from the Sept. 8 NSA/CISA/FBI distillation advisory that preceded Amodei's essay, grounding Beijing's response in the specific chip-restriction context.
Fear-mongering, confrontation and vicious competition will only hamper efforts toward sound global AI governance
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Originally reported by npr.org
Read the original article →Original headline: China's Foreign Ministry Slams Amodei's 'Fearmongering' AI Pacing Call in First Official Reply