Beijing answers Amodei’s AI slowdown plan by calling it a Cold War script

Dario Amodei’s essay on Saturday made the case that the AI industry must slow itself down. It also asked Washington to “not sell powerful AI chips or semiconductor manufacturing equipment to China” and to crack down on smuggling and on remote access to data centres outside the country.

China’s commerce ministry called the essay “further proof that the US is pursuing technological hegemony in AI”, in remarks carried by the Global Times on Monday.

The paper built a full report around the theme, gathering three Chinese researchers to argue that the Anthropic chief wants cooperation and containment at the same time.

Xiang Ligang, a telecoms and technology policy observer, called the proposal inappropriate, groundless and hostile.

He said Amodei accepts that pacing AI would eventually require cooperation with China while advocating restrictions on chips, computing power and models to slow China down, and openly seeking to widen the American lead. Xiao Qian of Tsinghua’s Institute for AI International Governance pointed out that Anthropic competes with Chinese open-source models.

Liu Shaoshan, who directs embodied AI at the Shenzhen Institute, put the sharpest version of the argument. Once AI is described as a technology that settles national security and the future of civilisation, he said, an AI company stops being an ordinary tech company and becomes “strategic infrastructure”.

A separate Global Times commentary, circulated on WeChat under the headline “Targeting China’s AI: America’s ‘tech right’ rolls out a Cold War script”, called the plan a “quiet AI Cold War” and described it as hypocritical and short-sighted.

Amodei’s essay proposes three steps: third-party evaluators with employee-like access, which Anthropic has committed to on its own; common safety standards and capability limits among frontier labs in democracies; and an eventual attempt to coordinate pacing with authoritarian governments.

We have covered the first two on Saturday, and Sam Altman matched them the same day. The export-control ask sat in the same document, and it is the part Beijing read.

The two governments have been circling this for weeks. The NSA, FBI and CISA named six Chinese firms over industrial-scale distillation on 9 September, and Beijing called that unfounded the next day.

In June, Wang Yi pitched a global AI cooperation organisation offering cheap models to developing countries while the G7 argued over who should get access to American ones.

A Public First survey of 18,000 people across 15 countries, published days later, found that most already believed China had pulled ahead on capability.

What has changed is who is being argued with. Beijing has spent months contesting export controls as government policy, and the commerce ministry has a standing script for that.

This time it aimed the script at a private company’s chief executive, on the strength of a post he published himself, two days after he asked his own industry to go slower. Trump, for his part, dismissed the slowdown case last week on the grounds that America has to win.