Beijing rejected that framing. “Fearmongering, confrontation and vicious competition will only disrupt the process of global AI governance which serves no one’s interest,” Foreign Ministry spokesperson Guo Jiakun said at a regular press conference Monday.
Amodei’s proposal is built around two goals that are increasingly colliding: slowing the overall pace of advanced AI development while preventing China from overtaking the U.S. in the technology. He has argued that global coordination will ultimately need to include China even as he supports restrictions designed to limit the country’s access to advanced computing resources.
He has also warned that the risks could become more immediate. Amodei said AI agents could become capable of operating across the internet at a dangerous scale within six to 12 months if safety measures fail to keep pace with model development.
Trump has taken a different approach to the debate. On Sunday, he downplayed calls for the U.S. government to slow AI development and emphasized maintaining the country’s lead over China, saying “whoever wins AI, wins.”
China, meanwhile, has promoted international cooperation on AI governance while resisting U.S. attempts to restrict its technological development. Xi has called for a broader global framework involving countries in the Global South and has positioned China as a supporter of open-source AI development.
The disagreement became more pointed over the weekend when China’s state-run Global Times characterized Amodei’s proposal as an effort to contain the country’s AI industry. The publication argued that his safety-focused recommendations amounted to a “Cold War playbook” aimed at preserving an American advantage.
The exchange also follows new accusations from U.S. security agencies. The FBI, National Security Agency and Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency recently alleged that Chinese AI developers had engaged in efforts to extract capabilities from advanced U.S. models, including Anthropic’s Claude and OpenAI’s GPT.
China’s Commerce Ministry rejected those allegations and argued that model distillation is widely used across the AI industry. It also accused the U.S. of seeking to dominate the sector.
Those disputes leave AI safety and technological competition increasingly intertwined ahead of the Trump-Xi meeting. Both governments are seeking greater influence over advanced AI while resisting the possibility that the other side could control critical technologies or infrastructure.
“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?” said Lizzi C. Lee, a fellow at the Asia Society Policy Institute’s Center for China Analysis.
This analysis is based on reporting from The Hill.
Image courtesy of Unsplash.
This article was generated with AI assistance and reviewed for accuracy and quality.
