Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic, has warned for years about the AI arms race between the US and China, saying that a loss would be disastrous. He now wants both nations to slow down, though China appears unwilling to cooperate.
Saturday saw the publication of a blog post by Amodei, titled “We Must Pace the Frontier,” where he argued that the two nations urgently need to cooperate to pace AI development. He wrote “Global pacing will require cooperation with China, the autocratic country with by far the most advanced AI capabilities,”.
Government officials, AI researchers and commentators in China have made their position plain: they see a poor bargain being offered. They acknowledge that AI carries serious risks, yet they refuse to accept the conditions set out by Amodei.
China’s Rejection
Kevin Xu, founder of the technology hedge fund Interconnected Capital and a former White House staffer under President Barack Obama, captured the Chinese position. “The AI safety community in China is growing and shares many of the same concerns that American labs do,” he said. “The gulf lies between an Anthropic-led vision that would only subjugate and restrict China first to maximize leverage before talking. Meanwhile, China would only talk if it’s being treated from a position of equals.”
Amodei himself wrote that a “key part” of the slowdown strategy should be ensuring the US and other democracies maintain “as large as possible” a lead in AI development over autocracies like China. He urged the US to crack down on chip smuggling and prevent unauthorized model distillation by Chinese companies.
“His essay specifically says the pacing of AI is conditional to increasing the lead over China,” says Alvin Wang Graylin, a senior fellow at the Asia Society Policy Institute’s Center for China Analysis and a digital fellow at the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered AI. “Which makes the proposal feel inauthentic to Chinese readers.”
Amodei also argued that weakening China’s AI industry would somehow give the US more leverage and make “an agreement more likely in the future.” Asked about this in a television interview, he admitted he had “no idea how to negotiate with China.”
The Ministry’s Words
When asked about Amodei’s post on Monday at a press conference, Guo Jiakun, a spokesperson for China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, did not soften the message. He described the proposal as “fear-mongering, confrontation, and vicious competition” that would only hamper global AI cooperation efforts.
On the following day, the ministry came forward with a statement, adding that “China puts equal emphasis on development and security in terms of AI.”
What Beijing Worries About
The fear among China’s leaders is not existential risk from artificial intelligence, such as a rogue agent killing everyone on Earth. Instead, their concern centers on maintaining domestic stability and holding onto the Chinese Communist Party’s grip on power.
“Beijing finds it difficult to take these calls at face value partly because it’s skeptical of the possibility of achieving AGI and doubtful of the narrative that AI poses extreme risks to humanity,” says Michelle Nie, a visiting fellow at the Center for a New American Security focused on national security and artificial intelligence. “Although Beijing is starting to recognize loss-of-control risks, the risk that Beijing seems most worried about is the threat AI could pose to CCP rule.”
China’s minister of state security, Chen Yixin, has recently cautioned that artificial intelligence could be used to spread political disinformation, launch cyberattacks, commit espionage, trigger social unrest and create fresh military dangers. His remarks focused mainly on practical threats rather than the doomsday scenarios that dominate US frontier AI labs.
“Chinese policymakers tend to read US companies’ calls for AI safety as instrumental,” says Nie. “They believe that US companies are seeking to inflate their own value ahead of potential IPOs or to slow down their competitors, which are primarily Chinese companies at this point.”
Industry Pushback
Beyond government officials, many people working within China’s AI industry also doubt the claims. That sector has concentrated on putting out cheaper, open-weight models.
A scientist working at DeepSeek made the case that AI has the power to push humanity toward one of two outcomes. One possibility is that advanced artificial intelligence becomes widely accessible, lifting living standards across the board. The other possibility is that just a few tech companies hold the most advanced systems, along with the wealth and influence that comes with them, which makes it ever harder for everyone else to close the gap.
“That is why I still believe the most advanced intelligence should be made available to everyone in an open and inexpensive way,” the DeepSeek engineer wrote. “I do not trust Anthropic or OpenAI to do that. And I especially do not want Anthropic to control the most advanced artificial intelligence or AGI.”
A Deal That Won’t Work
What Chinese readers find inauthentic about Amodei’s proposal is that it ties pacing to the US increasing its lead over China, which is the central condition at issue here.
The fact that Amodei admits he has no idea how to negotiate with China makes his request for cooperation all the more ironic. He is asking for collaboration even as he openly proposes steps toward maintaining a lead, and he cannot explain how to achieve that goal.
There’s no reason to assume US-China cooperation on AI safety is finished. Reports say early talks between the two nations are already taking place before Chinese leader Xi Jinping’s planned trip to Washington later this month, where he will meet with US President Donald Trump.
It is uncertain whether both parties can reach a shared position without one side demanding terms the other refuses to accept.
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