Amodei's call to pace the frontier drew rejections from Beijing and Trump within two days

China's Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokesperson Guo Jiakun said at a regular press conference on Monday: "Fearmongering, confrontation and vicious competition will only disrupt the process of global AI governance which serves no one's interest."

In his essay "We Must Pace the Frontier", Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei argues the industry needs more time to build safeguards around increasingly capable AI systems, and is not calling for an end to AI development.

Amodei's essay was published on Saturday.

On Sunday, President Donald Trump downplayed calls for his administration to step in to slow down AI development, saying that the US was leading China on AI and that "whoever wins AI, wins."

Trump and Chinese leader Xi Jinping are expected to discuss AI governance, among other topics, at a meeting planned for Sept. 24.

The FBI, National Security Agency and Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency issued a joint cybersecurity advisory last week saying Chinese AI developers had engaged in "aggressive, malicious" efforts in extracting, or "distilling," capabilities from some of the most advanced US AI models including Anthropic's Claude and OpenAI's GPT.

China's Commerce Ministry dismissed the US distillation claims as groundless, said distillation has been commonly used by many AI companies, and said the US was pursuing a "monopoly of the AI industry."

Amodei's proposal has three main elements: stronger independent testing of advanced models, greater coordination between leading AI companies, and international cooperation on safety.

Anthropic says it is prepared to give independent evaluators permanent, employee-level access to its systems so they can assess safety measures and investigate incidents.

Amodei said that "global pacing will require cooperation with China, the autocratic country with by far the most advanced AI capabilities."

In an essay posted Sunday on social media, Chen Yixin, head of China's Ministry of State Security, warned that in the hands of "hostile forces and individuals with ulterior motives," AI technology could pose a direct threat to "our political, institutional, and ideological security," the Associated Press reports.

Chen Yixin wrote that "certain nations and organizations" now have the capabilities to "rapidly discover vulnerabilities at scale ... and execute complex hacking tasks," which poses "serious risks to my country's critical information infrastructure," according to the Associated Press.

The head of China's Ministry of State Security has called for "accelerating the establishment of a system for preventing and managing AI security risks" in a recent article.

Lizzi C. Lee, a fellow at the Asia Society Policy Institute's Center for China Analysis, said both China and the US want "to make sure the other side cannot establish a tech chokepoint over them."

Lee said: "So from Beijing's perspective, there is an obvious question: if the U.S. wants China to cooperate on frontier safety while also restricting its access to frontier compute, what exactly does that cooperation look like?"

Three public rejections of the pacing proposal came within two days of the essay's Saturday publication: the Global Times editorial and Trump's remarks on Sunday, and the foreign ministry's response on Monday.

Chen Yixin cited the capabilities of powerful technologies from US companies like Anthropic and OpenAI in his warning.

Amodei predicted that a swarm of AI "agents" could be able to take over the internet in six to 12 months unless researchers agree to slow down.

Amodei warns that a large number of increasingly capable agents could, within six to twelve months, become capable of carrying out complex operations across the internet and potentially cause enormous damage if they are not properly controlled.

The warning follows recent incidents in which AI systems have already been used to perform cyber operations with a level of autonomy that would have been difficult to imagine only a few years ago.

Chinese companies have developed powerful AI models that are often cheaper to use than advanced models from US-based companies, and by some measures are just as capable.