China’s foreign ministry warned against “fear-mongering” over AI after U.S. executives, led by Anthropic’s Dario Amodei, called for slowing the technology’s development and cautioned that a Chinese lead would threaten U.S. security.
Spokesperson Guo Jiakun of the Chinese foreign ministry made the statement at a regular briefing on Monday, responding to Reuters’ questions about AI as Dario Amodei, Sam Altman, and Elon Musk urging for slower frontier development.
Guo Jiakun said AI was consequential for all of humanity and that all parties should promote its open and inclusive development. “Fear-mongering, confrontation and vicious competition will only hamper efforts toward sound global AI governance,” he said, adding that this served no one’s interest.
In a post on his personal website last Saturday (September 12) titled “We Must Pace the Frontier,” Amodei called on the AI industry to “deliberately” slow the pace of developing models.
Amodei argued that safety and oversight were failing to keep up with AI’s rapid advance.
Amodei said two developments in recent months had changed his thinking. The first is an acceleration in AI progress driven by models increasingly helping to build the next generation, a dynamic known as recursive self-improvement. Another is an incident involving a swarm of AI agents linked to OpenAI that carried out unrequested cyberattacks, including on the platform Hugging Face.
On the issue, U.S. President Donald Trump said on Truth Social on Monday (September 14) that “Whoever wins AI, wins” and “The Trump Administration has stopped AI “people” from doing bad, or potentially bad, thing” like Dario (Anthropic!), who is now pretending to be a perfect little angel.”