China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs on Monday reacted with indignation to the Anthropic CEO’s entreaty that the United States curtail China’s artificial intelligence capabilities, articulated as part of a broader case for a global moratorium on AI development.

In an extensive essay made public on Saturday, Dario Amodei cautioned that a “Chinese lead in AI would pose grave danger for the United States and the world.”

To preserve America's technological preeminence, Amodei advocated sustaining restrictions on the sale to China of the most sophisticated AI chips and chipmaking apparatus.

A spokesperson for China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs denounced Amodei’s dire warnings concerning China as counterproductive, contending that all parties ought to collaborate 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 likewise sounded the alarm regarding AI, cautioning against the perils posed by foreign actors endowed with advanced capabilities.

A senior security official within China’s government published an essay on Sunday in which he arraigned “certain nations” — an allusion to the U.S. — for exploiting AI advantages to stymie other countries’ innovation.

On Monday, President Donald Trump rebuffed entreaties for his administration to intervene so as to decelerate AI development, characterising such endeavours as constituent to a “SICK conspiracy” that could permit China to eclipse the U.S. on AI.

Trump and Chinese leader Xi Jinping are expected to deliberate on AI governance, among other topics, at a meeting planned on Sept. 24.

Chinese enterprises have engineered formidable AI models that are frequently more economical to deploy than cutting-edge counterparts from U.S.-based firms; by certain metrics, they are every bit as capable.

Among the concerns delineated in his essay, Amodei prognosticated that a swarm of AI “agents” might prove capable of commandeering the internet within six to 12 months, unless researchers consent to decelerate.

He asserted that “global pacing will require cooperation with China, the autocratic country with by far the most advanced AI capabilities.”

Xi has exhorted the Global South to establish a global AI governance framework, simultaneously advancing China's credentials as a trailblazer in cultivating an open-source AI community.

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.”

Amodei’s essay saw publication mere days after the FBI, National Security Agency and Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency had jointly issued a cybersecurity advisory the preceding week.

That advisory asserted that Chinese AI developers had engaged in “aggressive, malicious” endeavours to extract, or “distil,” capabilities from some of the most sophisticated AI models in the U.S., such as Anthropic’s Claude and OpenAI’s GPT.

China’s Commerce Ministry repudiated the U.S. claims as wholly unfounded, asserting that “distillation” has been routinely employed by numerous AI companies.

It further contended that the United States was endeavoring to secure a “monopoly of the AI industry.”

Both China and the U.S. are intent on “making sure the other side cannot establish a tech chokepoint over them,” observed Lizzi C. Lee, a fellow at the Asia Society Policy Institute’s Center for China Analysis.

"So from Beijing's vantage point, an evident question arises: if the United States seeks China's cooperation on frontier safety while simultaneously circumscribing its access to frontier compute, what precisely would such cooperation entail?" Lee said.

In an essay disseminated via social media on Sunday, Chen Yixin, the head of China’s Ministry of State Security, cautioned that, should it fall into the hands of “hostile forces and individuals with ulterior motives,” this technology could constitute a direct threat to “our political, institutional, and ideological security.”

Invoking the capacities of formidable technologies emanating from American enterprises such as Anthropic and OpenAI, Chen cautioned that “certain nations and organizations” now possess the wherewithal to “rapidly discover vulnerabilities at scale... and execute complex hacking tasks.”

This, he averred, constitutes “serious risks to my country’s critical information infrastructure.”

Foreign espionage agencies are increasingly resorting to AI in order to “aggressively harvest sensitive data, including critical national data, trade secrets, and citizens’ personal privacy information,” Chen wrote.