China's Foreign Ministry calls Amodei essay 'fearmongering'

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.