China Calls Amodei’s AI Proposal a New Cold War Playbook
September 14, 2026 
China rejects Amodei’s AI slowdown proposal, calling it fearmongering and a US attempt to contain China’s technology sector.
The debate over whether the world should slow down the development of advanced AI has quickly turned into something bigger than a technology argument. Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic, has called for a slower pace of development, arguing that AI capabilities are advancing faster than our ability to understand and control them. His proposal has now run straight into the geopolitical reality of the US-China competition.
In his essay, “We Must Pace the Frontier“, Amodei argues that the industry needs more time to build effective safeguards around increasingly capable AI systems. He isn’t calling for an end to AI development. His argument is that capability gains should slow enough to give safety research, testing and oversight a chance to catch up.
One of his main concerns is the growing ability of AI agents to act on their own. 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 aren’t 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.
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.
The difficult part starts when China enters the discussion.
Amodei argues that the United States needs to maintain its lead in advanced AI and supports continuing restrictions on China’s access to the most advanced AI chips and chipmaking equipment. He says a Chinese lead in frontier AI could create serious risks for the United States and the wider world.
The Government of Beijing strongly disagrees with that framing. China’s Foreign Ministry accused Amodei of spreading fear and argued that confrontation and competition would damage international efforts to establish rules for AI. China’s state-backed Global Times went further, describing the proposal as a “Cold War playbook” aimed at containing China’s technology sector.
Chinese officials are also warning about AI, but from the opposite direction. Chen Yixin, head of China’s Ministry of State Security, recently warned that advanced AI could be used by hostile actors to discover vulnerabilities at scale, conduct complex hacking operations and steal sensitive information.
“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,” this technology could pose a direct threat to “our political, institutional, and ideological security.”” The Associated Press reports.
“Citing the capabilities of powerful technologies from U.S. companies like Anthropic and OpenAI, Chen warned that “certain nations and organizations” now have the capabilities to “rapidly discover vulnerabilities at scale … and execute complex hacking tasks.” That, he wrote, poses “serious risks to my country’s critical information infrastructure.””
That contrast is important. Both sides are talking about AI security, but they don’t agree on what the security problem actually is.
Washington is concerned that China could gain access to capabilities that strengthen its military, intelligence and cyber operations. Beijing sees US restrictions on chips and AI technology as an attempt to prevent China from closing the technological gap.
The recent dispute over AI model distillation has made the situation even more complicated. US agencies have accused Chinese AI developers of aggressively extracting capabilities from leading American models, including Claude and GPT. Beijing has rejected those allegations and argued that model distillation is a common technique used across the AI industry.
This creates a problem for any proposal based on international cooperation. How do you persuade two countries to slow down together when each side believes that slowing down alone could leave it at a strategic disadvantage?
President rejected calls to slow AI development, despite warnings from leading tech executives and Democrats about existential risks. Anthropic’s Dario Amodei, OpenAI’s Sam Altman and Elon Musk urged a more cautious approach, but Trump said the US must maintain its global AI leadership while allowing some safeguards.
“Look, we’re leading China in AI . . . and, frankly, I want to keep it that way, because whoever wins AI, wins,” Trump told reporters during a trip to his Doonbeg golf course in Ireland, Financial Times reported. “We can put guardrails, we can do this and that, but I think you have a lot of negative forces that are bringing it up that shouldn’t be bringing it up and they’re bringing up things that won’t happen,” he added.
That puts Amodei’s proposal in a difficult position. The companies developing the most advanced models are increasingly warning that safety needs more time, while the political leadership in Washington sees AI leadership as a strategic asset that cannot be surrendered. Sam Altman and Elon Musk have backed Amodei’s call for greater caution, and other major AI leaders have also moved toward stronger safety measures.
The timing is particularly interesting because Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping are expected to discuss AI governance at their planned September 24 meeting. Any agreement between Washington and Beijing would have to deal with two very different priorities: controlling the risks created by increasingly autonomous AI systems while making sure neither side believes it is giving the other a technological advantage.
For cybersecurity professionals, this is more than a political dispute. The capabilities being discussed are already relevant to vulnerability discovery, exploitation, credential theft, surveillance and large-scale automated operations. The question is no longer simply how powerful AI models can become, but how quickly that power can be turned into real-world action.
That’s where the debate over slowing AI becomes particularly difficult. You can slow the development of a model, but you can’t easily slow a global competition in which governments, companies and attackers all have strong incentives to keep moving.
And that’s probably the uncomfortable part of the discussion: the countries most capable of creating the rules are also the countries with the strongest reasons not to slow down.
Follow me on Twitter: @securityaffairs and Facebook and Mastodon
Pierluigi Paganini
(SecurityAffairs – hacking, AI)
