China's most prominent state-backed newspaper has sharply rejected Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei's call to slow the development of frontier artificial intelligence, framing the proposal not as a safety measure but as a deliberate strategy to contain Chinese competition.
In an editorial published Monday, the Global Times said Amodei's essay — titled "We Must Pace the Frontier" — may read like a rational argument focused on safety risks, but is in reality a "Cold War playbook" aimed at China. The newspaper argued the essay's true agenda is "to attempt to curb China's AI development through technological barriers and regulatory monopolies, uphold Washington's monopolistic hegemony in cutting-edge technology and exclude China from the global AI governance system." For more context on this story, see our ongoing AI trends.
"This 'silent AI Cold War' is hypocritical and short-sighted," the editorial said, adding that walling China off from global AI innovation would "significantly increase the trial-and-error costs and risks of loss of control in global AI development" — an argument that inverts the essay's safety rationale by claiming exclusion makes everyone less safe.
What Amodei Actually Proposed
Amodei's essay, published September 12 on his personal site, laid out a framework for pacing the development of frontier AI capabilities to create more time to manage mounting safety risks. He argued that "building too fast is reckless" and warned that a swarm of AI agents could cause hundreds of billions of dollars in damage by "taking over the entire internet."
According to a Reuters report carried by The Straits Times, the essay also urged the United States to strengthen chip export controls on China and to crack down on what Anthropic alleges is model distillation by Chinese AI labs — a practice in which smaller models are trained to mimic the outputs of frontier systems. It is those two provisions, aimed squarely at China's AI industry, that drew the fiercest response from Beijing.
The essay quickly drew endorsements from across the industry's biggest names. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, Google DeepMind chief Demis Hassabis, and SpaceX and xAI founder Elon Musk all publicly backed the call, with Altman saying he would match Amodei's commitment to embedding outside evaluators within his company to verify safety practices.
Beijing Pushes Back on Multiple Fronts
The Global Times editorial is not the only sign of Chinese resistance. China's Foreign Ministry has warned that hyping AI "threat narratives" would disrupt global AI governance, according to the state newspaper's own reporting. Meanwhile, Chen Yixin, China's top intelligence official, has warned that adversaries' use of AI could pose a risk to the country's political and social security — a mirror image of the concerns raised in Washington.
Amodei himself acknowledged the dilemma in a September 13 interview with CBS News, saying the hardest question about his proposed slowdown was what happens "if China and other adversarial nations chose not to do the same."
Trump Dismisses the Slowdown Calls
US President Donald Trump has also rejected the idea, telling reporters that "very negative forces" were raising exaggerated concerns about AI. "We're leading China in AI. We're the most sophisticated country in the world, and frankly, I want to keep it that way because whoever wins AI, wins," Trump said, per Reuters.
The rejection from both Washington and Beijing underscores the central weakness of any voluntary pacing regime: with the two largest AI powers treating the technology as a strategic competition, neither has an incentive to slow down unilaterally. Jim Reid, head of global research at Deutsche Bank, told clients that intense competition makes it "difficult to imagine firms voluntarily stepping back while rivals continue to push ahead."
High-Stakes Diplomacy Ahead
The war of words comes at a sensitive moment. The United States and China are planning to discuss frontier AI safety risks in mid-September, according to sources cited by Reuters, and the issue could be raised during a summit between Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping scheduled for September 24.
Whether those talks can produce anything resembling the mutual verification mechanisms Amodei envisions remains deeply uncertain. Beijing's editorial suggests Chinese officials view the slowdown campaign as economic statecraft by other means — an attempt to freeze China out of the frontier while American labs consolidate their lead.
For now, the debate has accomplished something rare: it has united Altman, Musk, Hassabis and Amodei on one side, and the leaderships of both superpowers on the other. As the Global Times put it, the dispute is no longer only about how fast AI should move — it is about who gets to set the rules for how it moves.
Benedict George reported from Singapore. Additional reporting from Reuters and The Guardian informed this article.---
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