'Fearmongering': Beijing rejects Amodei's call to slow the pace of AI

'Fearmongering': Beijing rejects Amodei's call to slow the pace of AI

China's Foreign Ministry and President Trump both dismissed the proposal within 48 hours — while Sam Altman and Elon Musk backed the Anthropic CEO at home. The next milestone is the Xi–Trump meeting on September 24.

Dario Amodei's call to slow the pace of AI development met rejection from both sides of the Pacific in under two days. China's Foreign Ministry on Monday, September 14, called the warnings from American AI executives "fearmongering," shortly after the state-affiliated newspaper Global Times described the proposal for an industry-wide slowdown as a "Cold War playbook." The same day, President Trump attacked the Anthropic CEO on Truth Social. The parallel rejections come barely two weeks before Xi Jinping and Trump meet on September 24.

What Amodei Actually Proposed

In the essay "We Must Pace the Frontier," published Saturday, September 12, Amodei writes: "We must slow the pace at which we improve the capabilities of AI models. Progress will still seem fast, and we must make wise use of the time we gain." He argues that risk management needs time to catch up with capability development.

According to NBC News, Amodei further claimed that a "Chinese lead in AI would pose grave danger for the United States and the world," and called for the US to restrict sales of key technology to China. He also proposed giving independent evaluators employee-like access to the models — a proposal OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has backed, while Elon Musk said, according to Bloomberg, that the Anthropic CEO was right. The industry's foremost advocate for slowing down thus received support at home — and rejection from both capitals.

Beijing: "Fearmongering"

At a regular press briefing on Monday, Foreign Ministry spokesperson Guo Jiakun said, according to NBC News: "Fearmongering, confrontation and malicious competition will only disrupt the process of global AI governance and serve no one's interests." Bloomberg quotes the same statement with "vicious competition" instead of "malicious competition" — likely a translation difference that cannot be resolved from available sources. According to Bloomberg, Guo did not address the specific proposals in the essay.

The day before, Global Times — known through accounts in NBC News and the NY Post — described the slowdown appeal as "packed with containment provisions targeting China and is, in essence, a 'Cold War playbook' for the AI sector." The full content of the editorial is not available from a primary source and must be read with that caveat.

Trump's Parallel Rejection

Trump attacked Amodei directly in a post on Truth Social, quoted by the NY Post: "We already have tremendous CRIMINAL and REGULATORY power over these companies! There is a SICK conspiracy going on against AI and Data Centers, and the only one that is happy about it is China. WHOEVER WINS AI, WINS!" This is an assertion by the president, not documented evidence of a conspiracy. Trump's post effectively places him on Beijing's side of the slowdown question — albeit based on competitive logic rather than a sovereignty logic.

China's Dual Approach

At the same time the Foreign Ministry rejected the warnings, Minister of State Security Chen Yixin said on Sunday, according to NBC News, that China must "accelerate the establishment of a system for preventing and controlling AI security risks." It is an apparent tension: publicly rejecting others' security warnings while accelerating its own work on AI security risks. The sources do not support interpreting this as an internal Chinese contradiction — but the contrast is telling for how Beijing appears in the debate.

The Road Ahead

The Xi–Trump meeting on September 24 will be the next milestone for whether the split between the countries over AI governance has consequences at the highest level. What the meeting will produce is unknown. What remains after this week is that hardly a single actor in a position of power — in neither Beijing nor Washington — currently supports Amodei's core proposal to slow the pace.