Reactions from China to the earthquake caused by Anthropic’s proposal to slow down the development of artificial intelligence (AI) show the tension between the great powers, Beijing and Washington. Especially after Donald Trump downplayed the inherent risks of AI and pointed out that the real danger is that China will get ahead. The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs stated this Monday that spreading threat narratives or fostering confrontation will only hinder the governance process of artificial intelligence (AI), amid the debate generated in the United States about the need to slow down the development of this technology. In addition, the Chinese state newspaper Global Times accused part of the US tech community of taking advantage of the concern in the US about AI risks and calls to slow its development to deploy a “Cold War manual” against Chinese AI. Amodei’s call is presented as a “rational statement” focused on global AI safety, but in reality contains a “hidden agenda” against China, according to the outlet.
Foreign Ministry spokesperson Guo Jiakun defended at a routine press conference this Monday that the development of AI — a field in which China and the US compete fiercely — concerns the welfare of all humanity, so all parties must jointly promote an AI that is “open, inclusive, accessible to all, and oriented towards good.” “Spreading threat narratives” or promoting “malicious competition” will only hinder the global governance process of this technology, Guo declared, a situation that, he opined, “does not benefit the interests of any party.”
Guo also pointed out the effect that new technologies produce in cyberspace and argued that Beijing already formally incorporates AI into its national cybersecurity regulatory system and continues to improve the corresponding institutional norms and ethical codes. “China is willing to continue working together with the international community to actively respond to the risks and challenges posed by cybersecurity in the intelligent era, promote the construction of a community with a shared future in cyberspace, and make the internet better benefit the peoples of all countries,” Guo noted.
The urgency to regulate AI divided the main voices of Silicon Valley and the White House this weekend, after Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic; OpenAI CEO Sam Altman; and magnate Elon Musk called for deliberately slowing the pace of development of the most advanced models in the face of risks such as loss of control over systems.
US President Donald Trump labeled those calling for regulation of this tool as “negative forces,” considering that the United States is “leading ahead of China in AI,” is “the most sophisticated country in the world,” and he wants to “keep it that way.”
After the debate began, Chinese Minister of State Security Chen Yixin called in a text published by the Cyberspace Administration of China to promote a “healthy and orderly” development of this technology, along with greater supervision over data, algorithms, computing infrastructure, and applications for civil and military use.
The warning comes at a time of intense activity in the Chinese sector, with companies like DeepSeek, Moonshot, Alibaba, Tencent, or Zhipu competing through open models, low prices, and rapid commercial deployment that approach the most advanced US systems, despite the North American country’s restrictions on advanced chips.
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This summer, Chinese President Xi Jinping called for “precise and effective” governance of AI and China launched an international cooperation organization on AI in Shanghai with about thirty countries. The debate takes place two weeks before Xi’s scheduled visit to the White House at the end of September, a meeting in which AI would likely be one of the topics to be discussed with Trump.
“Strangling” Chinese development
The newspaper Global Times, dependent on the People’s Daily, the organ of the Communist Party of China (CPC, ruling), published the editorial this Sunday after Dario Amodei called for a “slower pace” in the development of advanced models.
The editorial accuses the head of Anthropic of defending that democracies “should not be naive” towards China and of proposing first to “strangle” Chinese development to widen the technological gap before negotiating with Beijing a slowdown of the sector. The newspaper lists three measures it attributes to that agenda: banning the sale to China of powerful chips and semiconductor manufacturing machinery, pursuing the so-called “distillation” of models, and strengthening the security of AI companies to prevent the theft of the so-called “weights” of the models, the internal parameters that configure the system’s knowledge.
“Distillation” is a technique that allows training smaller models using responses from more advanced systems, and it has become one of the main points of dispute after US authorities recently accused Chinese companies like DeepSeek, Moonshot, and Alibaba of copying US technology. Beijing rejected those accusations and maintained that it is a common practice in the industry, while accusing Washington of applying a “double standard” and seeking a “monopoly” over AI.
Global Times described what it called a “silent AI Cold War” as “hypocritical and short-sighted,” whose real goal would be, according to the newspaper, to slow Chinese development through technological barriers and “regulatory monopolies.” “Excluding China and Chinese companies will only significantly increase trial and error costs and risks of loss of control in the global development of AI,” the outlet warned. The stance of the state newspaper reproduces the narrative used by Beijing in response to criticisms on issues such as its military spending.
In both cases, the Chinese government argues that its development does not represent a global threat and accuses Washington of trying to slow the country’s progress. The publication comes after US President Donald Trump rejected calls to slow AI with the argument that the United States must maintain the advantage over China, and after Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent warned that “nothing else will matter” if Beijing takes the lead.
