BEIJING — China on Monday pushed back on calls by U.S. AI executives for companies to slow down the development of the cutting-edge technology.
“Fear mongering, confrontation, competition will just disrupt [the] process of global AI governance,” Guo Jiakun, a spokesperson for China’s Foreign Ministry, said on Monday, per an English translation published by Reuters.
He was responding to a question about U.S. CEOs, including Anthropic’s Dario Amodei, OpenAI’s Sam Altman and Elon Musk, calling for the industry to slow down because of the dangers rapid advances in the technology pose.
China’s Minister of State Security, Chen Yixin, published an article on Sunday calling for the acceleration of construction of an AI security risk prevention and control system.
The field of AI has become “the main battleground for global technological competition and a new arena for strategic rivalry among major powers,” the minister said, adding there was a need for “healthy and orderly” development of the technology.
Closing the AI gap
AI-related stocks slumped on Monday, with SoftBank — one of the biggest investors in OpenAI — down 10% in Japan.
“Not building the technology deprives humanity of benefits or simply places AI in the hands of authoritarian powers, while building it too fast is reckless,” Amodei said in an essay published on Saturday.
He noted, however, that pacing would be limited by the lead that U.S. companies have over “authoritarian regimes, chiefly the Chinese Communist Party.”
“If we slow down by more than this amount, then (unpaced) CCP-associated projects will pull ahead, creating significant national security risk,” Amodei said.
U.S. President Donald Trump also warned against the U.S. losing any strategic advantage in the AI arms race. During a trip to Ireland, he rejected the AI bosses’ calls, saying, “Look, we’re leading China in AI… and, frankly I want to keep it that way because whoever wins AI, wins.”
At the weekend, President Xi Jinping said at the BRICS bloc summit in New Delhi that China will take the lead to help foster AI collaboration and development among developing countries.
Adoption of Chinese AI models is also gaining traction among Western companies as the capability have improved.
Helen Toner, executive director of the Georgetown Center for Security and Emerging Technology and former OpenAI board member, told “Squawk Box” Monday: “The best estimates tend to say China’s very best models are something like six to nine months behind the very best U.S. models.”
“If that means that we slow down and they just rip past us because they’re pretty close behind — that’s a problem,” said Toner.
“It’s actually not clear how much of their advancements are sort of fast following. Where if the U.S. frontier slows, perhaps China also slows somewhat.”
