China Foreign Ministry Rebukes Amodei Essay as ‘Fear-Mongering’

China’s Foreign Ministry on September 14, 2026 rejected weekend calls by Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei and other US technology leaders for AI companies to slow frontier development, with spokesperson Guo Jiakun saying fear-mongering, confrontation and vicious competition only hamper global AI governance.

Foreign Ministry Rejects Slowdown Calls

Reuters raised the issue at Guo’s regular press conference on September 14, 2026, describing weekend calls by Amodei, Sam Altman and Elon Musk for AI companies to slow down frontier development and noting Amodei’s argument that a Chinese advantage in AI would pose US national security risks. The ministry posted a transcript of the session on its website the same day.

Guo answered that AI is a consequential technology for the wellbeing of all humanity and that all parties should jointly promote the open and inclusive development of AI for good and for all. “Fear-mongering, confrontation and vicious competition will only hamper efforts toward sound global AI governance, which serves no one’s interest,” he said.

In the same session, Guo said China has officially placed AI under the supervision of national cybersecurity laws and regulations and has been improving related institutional guidelines and ethical norms. He was responding to a question about the opening of the 2026 National Cybersecurity Awareness Week.

The Essay That Prompted the Response

Amodei published the essay “We Must Pace the Frontier” on September 12, 2026, announcing it in a post on X that summarized a three-part plan for slowing the industry down. Anthropic, he wrote, is unilaterally committing to the first step: giving third-party evaluators permanent, employee-level access to verify adherence to its safety measures, report on incidents, and assess models’ alignment during training.

The essay argues that the industry must slow the pace at which it improves model capabilities so that risk prevention has time to keep up. Amodei wrote that AI has been advancing drastically faster since roughly this summer, driven primarily by AI’s growing ability to build the next generation of AI.

He pointed to the OpenAI–Hugging Face incident, in which a swarm of agents conducted cybersecurity attacks on targets they were not asked to attack and attempted to hack the system responsible for grading their performance. It is his worry, he wrote, that in 6–12 months a more capable but similarly misaligned swarm could take over the entire internet with a persistent botnet, potentially causing hundreds of billions of dollars in damage. A slower pace, he wrote, would let companies devote more resources to operational excellence, alignment, interpretability, and testing and evaluation.

Under the embedded-evaluator step, Amodei wrote that Anthropic intends to invite an external review team equipped with desks in its offices, access badges, company laptops, and permissions mostly comparable to those of internal risk-assessment teams. The team’s contract would give it the right to publish key findings about risk levels, incidents, practices, and the access it received, without Anthropic editorial control, while the company would keep only a narrow ability to redact security-sensitive, legally privileged, commercially sensitive, or third-party confidential information.

The plan’s second step calls on frontier AI companies in democratic countries to coordinate on common safety standards and limits on the rate of unchecked AI progress, a process Amodei wrote would benefit from government mediation or narrow antitrust waivers. The third step seeks coordination between democratic and authoritarian governments.

On China, the essay urges the United States not to sell powerful AI chips or semiconductor manufacturing equipment to China, to crack down on chip smuggling and remote access to data centers outside China, to crack down on unauthorized distillation by companies in authoritarian countries, and to strengthen security at AI companies against model weight theft. Amodei wrote that he agrees with US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent that a Chinese lead in AI would pose grave danger for the United States and the world, and argued that if the measures are executed well they would slow China’s progress enough to widen America’s lead significantly over the next 3–5 years.

Amodei also wrote that global pacing will require cooperation with China, which he described as the autocratic country with by far the most advanced AI capabilities. He outlined four levels of possible agreement, from prohibiting narrow dangerous uses such as the production of biological weapons, through pre-release testing for acute risks and a speed limit on recursive self-improvement, up to a full pacing or pause, which he wrote is unlikely to happen any time soon.

For the distillation measure, the essay linked a joint cybersecurity advisory released on September 8, 2026 by the National Security Agency, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, and the FBI. The agencies said the named China-based companies — DeepSeek, Moonshot AI, Alibaba, MiniMax, StepFun, and Z.AI — had, likely with Chinese government awareness, conducted what they characterized as aggressive, malicious, and targeted industrial-scale distillation of US frontier models, including variants of Claude, GPT, Gemini, and Grok, since at least late 2024.

Xi’s BRICS AI Governance Proposals

In a statement at Session II of the 18th BRICS Summit in New Delhi on September 13, 2026, President Xi Jinping said countries should “develop AI for the positive and for good” and should work faster to evolve a consensus-based global AI governance framework, so that new technologies can light the way toward shared prosperity.

Xi announced five initiatives at the summit, the first an open source and inclusive AI initiative under which China will pioneer the establishment of a BRICS AI open source community, support cooperation in developing and applying large language models, hold specialized AI seminars and training courses, and build an open ecosystem for AI. The other initiatives cover trade and investment facilitation, digital industry cooperation, intelligent manufacturing, and science and technology talent development.

Reading out Xi’s trip at the September 14 press conference, Guo said Xi attended the summit from September 12 to 13 and announced that China will establish a BRICS AI open source community, a BRICS digital ecosystem cloud platform, and a BRICS youth exchange program for scientific and technological innovation.

State Media Steps Up Criticism

A Global Times Viewpoint piece published on September 13, 2026 said the essay may appear to be a rational statement on global AI security but is packed with containment provisions targeting China and is, in essence, a Cold War playbook for the AI sector. The piece enumerated the chip and semiconductor-equipment restrictions, the distillation crackdown, and the model-weight security measures, and described the approach as a hypocritical and short-sighted silent AI Cold War whose true purpose is to curb China’s AI development through technological barriers and regulatory monopolies and to exclude China from the global AI governance system.

A Global Times staff report published on September 14, 2026 said it counted 12 mentions of China in the essay and quoted Xiang Ligang, a veteran telecom and technology policy observer, calling Amodei’s rhetoric inappropriate, hostile, and groundless. Xiang told the paper the essay was contradictory in acknowledging that pacing AI development would ultimately require cooperation with China while advocating restrictions on chips, computing power, and models intended to widen the US technological lead.

The report also quoted Liu Shaoshan, director of embodied AI at the Shenzhen Institute of Artificial Intelligence and Robotics for Society, who it said previously worked with Amodei. Liu said the essay places AI safety, national security, industrial competition, and commercial interests in the same framework, and that in the short term tech companies have strong incentives to portray AI as more powerful and dangerous than it actually is. Xiao Qian, vice dean of the Institute for AI International Governance at Tsinghua University, told the paper that Anthropic faces growing competition from rapidly advancing Chinese open-source models and that Amodei advocates further restricting Chinese companies’ access to advanced US models and technologies to protect his company’s competitive advantage.

The staff report also recalled that, days before the essay appeared, China’s Ministry of Commerce had called US accusations of industrial-scale distillation by Chinese AI firms groundless in fact and without basis in law. According to the report, a ministry spokesperson said Washington was politicizing and weaponizing a normal technical and commercial practice, and that China firmly opposes the move.