China has rejected calls from U.S. artificial intelligence executives to slow the pace of development, saying such rhetoric would undermine the process of global AI governance.
Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Guo Jiakun said Monday, according to an English translation published by Reuters, that “fear mongering, confrontation, competition will just disrupt [the] process of global AI governance.” He was responding to comments from several U.S. tech leaders, including Anthropic’s Dario Amodei, OpenAI’s Sam Altman and Elon Musk, who warned about the risks of rapid advances in the technology and urged the industry to slow down.
At the same time, China’s Minister of State Security, Chen Yixin, said in an article published Sunday that the country should speed up the building of a system for AI security risk prevention and control. He described AI as “the main battleground for global technological competition and a new arena for strategic rivalry among major powers,” while calling for “healthy and orderly” development of the technology.
Race to close the AI gap
Markets also reacted to the debate. AI-related stocks fell on Monday, and SoftBank — one of OpenAI’s biggest investors — dropped 10% in Japan.
In an essay published Saturday, Dario Amodei argued that not building the technology would deprive humanity of its benefits or leave AI in the hands of authoritarian powers, while moving too fast would be reckless. He added, however, that any effort to pace development would be constrained by the lead U.S. companies hold over “authoritarian regimes, chiefly the Chinese Communist Party.” In his view, slowing by more than that margin could allow Chinese Communist Party-linked projects to move ahead and create a significant national security risk.
U.S. President Donald Trump also pushed back against the idea that Washington should ease its pace in the AI race. During a trip to Ireland, he rejected the appeals from AI executives, saying the United States was ahead of China and should stay that way because “whoever wins AI, wins.”
Over the weekend, President Xi Jinping said at the BRICS summit in New Delhi that China would take the lead in promoting AI cooperation and development among developing countries. Meanwhile, Chinese AI models are gaining more traction with Western companies as their capabilities improve.
Helen Toner, executive director of the Georgetown Center for Security and Emerging Technology and a former OpenAI board member, said on CNBC’s “Squawk Box” that the best estimates suggest China’s top models are about six to nine months behind the best U.S. systems. She said it would be a problem if the U.S. slowed down and China moved past it, although it remains unclear how much of China’s progress reflects fast-following and whether Chinese advances might also slow if the U.S. frontier slows.
