China warns of AI "fear-mongering" after US CEOs urge a slowdown
Evan / Policy and Open Source desk
The call to slow frontier AI came from US tech leaders. Beijing’s answer arrived within days, and it treated the proposal as a competitive move.
What was said
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei called for slowing frontier AI development, and OpenAI’s Sam Altman and Elon Musk said they agreed.
At the Chinese foreign ministry’s press conference on September 14, 2026, a reporter asked about their calls. Spokesperson Guo Jiakun answered that “fear-mongering, confrontation and vicious competition will only hamper efforts toward sound global AI governance.”
State-run China Daily went further in an editorial and called the push self-serving.
How the two sides frame it
In the US debate, the slowdown proposal is presented as a safety measure by the companies building the most capable models. In Beijing’s official reply, the same proposal is described through the language of confrontation and competition, and state media treat it as serving American interests.
Doubts about Chinese participation also come from Washington. David Sacks, who has pushed back on the slowdown calls, said China would be “very unlikely” to join a global agreement to regulate the technology.
Sources
Related
OpenAI says it is working with Anthropic and Google on AI safety
Chris Lehane, OpenAI's global policy chief, confirmed at a Washington briefing on September 15, 2026 that the company has spent several weeks in talks with Anthropic and Google DeepMind about a self-regulatory organization modeled on the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority, which oversees US brokers. The body would test the most powerful AI systems before public release. The idea came from Demis Hassabis, who proposed it in July and argued the funding would need to be substantial and mostly industry-paid. Lehane said OpenAI does not see the need for an antitrust waiver. Spokespeople for Anthropic and Google DeepMind did not immediately comment.
Trump rejects the AI slowdown: "whoever wins AI, wins"
On September 13, 2026, President Trump told reporters at his Doonbeg golf resort in Ireland that warnings about AI are overstated, blamed "negative forces" for raising them, and said the US leads China in AI and intends to keep it that way, summing it up as "whoever wins AI, wins." A day earlier, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei had published an essay calling for AI companies and governments to pace AI development, with OpenAI's Sam Altman and xAI's Elon Musk agreeing. David Sacks, co-chair of the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, told the labs on X to "go ahead and pace the frontier" without demanding regulation in return, and Cohere CEO Aidan Gomez called the plan "a cartel by any other name."
Anthropic's Dario Amodei asks the AI industry to slow down
On September 12, 2026, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei published an essay titled 'We Must Pace the Frontier', arguing that AI systems increasingly help build their own successors and warning that within 6 to 12 months an agent swarm could be capable of taking over the entire internet with a persistent botnet, potentially causing hundreds of billions of dollars in damage. He proposes embedded third-party evaluators with employee-like access inside AI labs, coordination among democratic AI companies, and eventually global coordination, and says Anthropic is adopting the first step now. Elon Musk replied that Dario is right, Sam Altman said OpenAI would also give independent evaluators employee-like access, and Russia's Kirill Dmitriev said the genie cannot be put back in the bottle.
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