China's Guo Jiakun rejects Amodei's AI slowdown call

The exchange marks a direct collision between two views on how fast frontier AI should advance. On September 12, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei published an essay titled "We Must Pace the Frontier", arguing that the industry should slow the pace of capability gains and framing coordination within democracies as limited by the US lead over China. He set preconditions: export bans on AI chips and semiconductor equipment to China, and crackdowns on unauthorized distillation by authoritarian-country firms. A third-stage task, he wrote, would be global coordination including authoritarian states.

Two days later, at a regular press briefing on September 14, China's Foreign Ministry deputy spokesperson Guo Jiakun was asked about that position by a Reuters reporter, who noted that Amodei, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk had jointly called for a slowdown in frontier AI development. Guo answered that AI development concerns the common well-being of all humanity, that all parties should cooperate to advance open, inclusive and universally beneficial AI, and that spreading threat theories or engaging in confrontation and vicious competition only obstructs global AI governance and benefits no party. He did not name Amodei or any company.

At the same briefing, Guo tied the discussion to the BRICS summit held in India, where Xi Jinping proposed an open-source and inclusive AI initiative. China, he said, would take the lead in establishing a BRICS AI open-source community and build a cloud foundation for the BRICS digital ecosystem, and would help Global South countries build capacity to share in the benefits of emerging technologies. China chairs BRICS next year. The two threads — US calls for pacing and Chinese promotion of open-source AI for the Global South — now sit side by side, and how far each gains traction is likely to shape the next round of AI governance talks.