China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs on Monday reacted with indignation to the Anthropic CEO’s call for the United States to restrain China’s artificial intelligence capabilities, placing it within a broader argument for a global slowdown on AI development.

In a lengthy essay published on Saturday, Dario Amodei warned that a “Chinese lead in AI would pose grave danger for the United States and the world.”

To help the U.S. keep its technological edge, Amodei called for maintaining restrictions on sales to China of the most advanced AI chips and chipmaking equipment.

A spokesperson for China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs characterized Amodei’s alarming warnings regarding China as counterproductive, emphasizing 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 also raised the alarm about AI, warning of the risks posed by foreign entities with advanced capabilities.

A top security official in China’s government published an essay on Sunday in which he accused “certain nations” — a reference to the U.S. — of using AI advantages to hinder other countries’ innovation.

On Monday, President Donald Trump pushed back against calls for his administration to step in and slow down AI development, saying such efforts were part of a “SICK conspiracy” that could let China eclipse the U.S. on AI.

Trump and Chinese leader Xi Jinping are anticipated to deliberate on AI governance, among other subjects, at a meeting scheduled for Sept. 24.

Chinese companies have developed powerful AI models that are often cheaper to use than advanced models from U.S.-based companies; by some measures, they are just as capable.

Among the concerns outlined in his essay, Amodei predicted that a swarm of AI “agents” could take over the internet within six to 12 months unless researchers agree to slow down.

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

Xi has called for the establishment of a global AI governance framework among the Global South, while presenting China as a pioneer in building 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 although Amodei’s essay may on the surface appear to focus on global AI security, it is “packed with containment provisions targeting China and is, in essence, a ‘Cold War playbook’ for the AI sector.”

Amodei’s essay was published only days after the FBI, the National Security Agency, and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency issued a joint cybersecurity advisory last week.

That advisory stated that Chinese AI developers had engaged in “aggressive, malicious” efforts to extract — or “distill” — capabilities from some of the most advanced AI models in the U.S., including Anthropic’s Claude and OpenAI’s GPT.

China’s Commerce Ministry rejected the U.S. allegations as entirely unfounded, asserting that “distillation” has been widely employed by numerous AI companies.

It further contended that the United States was seeking 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,” said Lizzi C. Lee, a fellow at the Asia Society Policy Institute’s Center for China Analysis.

"So from Beijing's perspective, there is an obvious question: if the U.S. wants China to cooperate on frontier safety while also restricting its access to frontier compute, what exactly does that cooperation look like?" Lee said.

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

Citing the capabilities of powerful technologies from U.S. companies like Anthropic and OpenAI, Chen warned that “certain nations and organizations” now have the capabilities to “rapidly discover vulnerabilities at scale... and execute complex hacking tasks.”

That, he wrote, poses “serious risks to my country’s critical information infrastructure.”

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