China bristles at Anthropic CEO’s 'fearmongering' about its AI
development
[September 15, 2026] By
E. EDUARDO CASTILLO and CHAN HO-HIM
BEIJING (AP) — China's Ministry of Foreign Affairs on Monday bristled at
the Anthropic CEO's call for the U.S. to curb China's artificial
intelligence capabilities as part of a wider argument for a global
slowdown on AI development.
In a lengthy essay published Saturday, Dario Amodei warned that a
“Chinese lead in AI would pose grave danger for the United States and
the world.” To enable the U.S. to keep its technological edge, Amodei
called for maintaining restrictions on sales to China of the most
advanced AI chips and chipmaking equipment.
A spokesperson for China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs said Amodei's
dire warnings about China were counterproductive and that all parties
should work together on AI.
“Fearmongering, confrontation and vicious competition will only disrupt
the process of global AI governance -- which serves no one’s interest,”
spokesperson Guo Jiakun said at a press conference in response to a
question about Amodei’s essay.
For their part, Chinese leaders have also sounded the alarm about AI,
warning of the risks posed by foreign entities with advanced
capabilities. A top security official in China’s government published an
essay on Sunday in which he accused “certain nations” — a reference to
the U.S. — of leveraging AI advantages to hinder other countries’
innovation.
On Monday, President Donald Trump pushed back against calls for his
administration to step in to slow down AI development, saying such
efforts were part of a “SICK conspiracy” which could allow China to
eclipse the U.S. on AI.
Trump and Xi could discuss AI governance at summit
Trump and Chinese leader Xi Jinping are expected to discuss AI
governance, among other topics, at a meeting planned on Sept. 24.
Chinese companies have developed powerful AI models that are often
cheaper to use than advanced models from U.S.-based companies; by some
measures, they are just as capable.
Among the concerns outlined in his essay, Amodei predicted that a swarm
of AI “agents” could be able to take over the internet in six to 12
months unless researchers agree to slow down. He said that “global
pacing will require cooperation with China, the autocratic country with
by far the most advanced AI capabilities.”
Xi has called for the setting up of a global AI governance framework
among the Global South, while pitching China as a pioneer in
establishing an open-source AI community.
Beijing accuses US of trying to hold it back
In an editorial published Sunday, China’s state-run Global Times
newspaper dismissed Amodei’s essay as a veiled call to “contain” China.
It said that Amodei’s essay may appear on the surface to be focused on
global AI security, but, that it is “packed with containment provisions
targeting China and is, in essence, a ‘Cold War playbook’ for the AI
sector.”
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A worker passes by robots from Chinese company Lens at the China
International Supply Chain Expo in Beijing on Monday, June 22, 2026.
(AP Photo/Ng Han Guan, File)
 Amodei’s essay was published a few
days after the FBI, National Security Agency and Cybersecurity and
Infrastructure Security Agency issued a joint cybersecurity advisory
last week. That advisory said Chinese AI developers had engaged in
“aggressive, malicious” efforts in extracting, or “distilling,”
capabilities from some of the most advanced AI models in the U.S.
like Anthropic’s Claude and OpenAI’s GPT.
China’s Commerce Ministry dismissed the U.S. claims as groundless
and said “distillation” has been commonly used by many AI companies.
It also said that the U.S. was pursuing a “monopoly of the AI
industry.”
Both China and the U.S. want “to make sure the other side cannot
establish a tech chokepoint over them,” said Lizzi C. Lee, a fellow
at the Asia Society Policy Institute’s Center for China Analysis.
“So from Beijing’s perspective, there is an obvious question: 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?” Lee said.
China has worries about AI in the hands of ‘hostile forces’
In an essay posted Sunday on social media, Chen Yixin, head of
China’s Ministry of State Security, warned that, in the hands of
“hostile forces and individuals with ulterior motives,” this
technology could pose a direct threat to “our political,
institutional, and ideological security.”
Citing the capabilities of powerful technologies from U.S. companies
like Anthropic and OpenAI, Chen warned that “certain nations and
organizations” now have the capabilities to “rapidly discover
vulnerabilities at scale ... and execute complex hacking tasks.”
That, he wrote, poses “serious risks to my country’s critical
information infrastructure.”
Foreign spying agencies are turning to AI to “aggressively harvest
sensitive data, including critical national data, trade secrets, and
citizens’ personal privacy information,” Chen wrote.
___
Chan reported from Hong Kong. Associated Press writer Didi Tang in
Washington contributed to this report.
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