China has warned against “fear-mongering” after the CEO of a top artificial intelligence (AI) company in the United States sounded the alarm against AI advancement and called for restrictions on the sale of AI chips to China. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei on Saturday called for the development of the most powerful AI systems to be slowed down, warning that they could soon pose potentially catastrophic risks to humanity itself. His proposal also calls for Washington to restrict China’s access to advanced technology – prompting Beijing to accuse the US of using AI safety as a pretext to preserve its technological dominance.
The dispute comes as Washington and Beijing compete over increasingly capable AI models, with US President Donald Trump declaring, “Whoever wins AI wins.” So, what has got AI giants worried, why is China being seen as a threat? Anthropic’s Amodei warned in an essay published over the weekend that AI capabilities have been advancing rapidly, and he proposed pacing the development of frontier models to give governments and researchers more time to manage their risks. His assertions were endorsed by his rivals – OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and SpaceX founder and Tesla CEO Elon Musk.
In addition to AI safety, Amodei warned that a “Chinese lead in AI would pose grave danger for the US and the world” and urged Washington to maintain restrictions on cutting-edge AI chips and chipmaking equipment going to China. He also called for action against alleged “distillation” of US models by Chinese AI laboratories. On Sunday, Trump rejected calls for a slowdown, describing some concerns as exaggerated.
We’re the most sophisticated country in the world, and frankly, I want to keep it that way because whoever wins AI wins,” he said on Sunday. China’s Foreign Ministry on Monday urged countries to pursue an “open, inclusive and benevolent approach to AI”. The state-backed Global Times went further, describing Amodei’s proposal as a “Cold War playbook” whose real purpose was to curb Chinese AI development and preserve US technological dominance.
The US remains ahead in several of the most important features of the AI race, but China has been closing the gap, experts say. American companies continue to dominate private investment and production of leading AI models. According to Stanford University’s 2026 AI Index Report, US companies invested $285.9bn in AI in 2025, compared with $12.4bn in China.
The US also has an advantage in the most advanced semiconductors needed to train cutting-edge models. However, Chinese companies have demonstrated that they can produce resilient AI models despite US restrictions on their access to the most advanced AI chips. In January, the release of Chinese AI startup DeepSeek made headlines after it caused share prices in US tech companies to plummet, claiming that its model would cost only a fraction of the money its competitors had spent on their own AI programmes to build.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
